I just prepared the following tutorial and screencast for a colleague and wanted to post it here as well in case it’s useful.

Step One: Download Thunderbird and install on your machine as per the instructions.

Step Two: Select File -> New -> Account… Tick “RSS News & Blogs” and follow the prompts.

Step Three: Click on the heading of your new RSS News & Blogs category and click Manage Subscriptions in the main page.  In the pop-up that appears, click Add.

Step Four: Locate the RSS feed for the content you wish to …

Background

One of the areas I’ve developed quite an interest in over the last year or so is the production of screencasts and video tutorials that model and demonstrate new technologies and new ways of working – I’ve also grown to love making them. However along with the use of video has come a dramatic increase in the size of the files I’m working with.
CamStudio has served me well for the last several months (and dozens of videos), however the AVI files that are native to the application …

One of my favourite open source programs is an audio editing package known as Audacity. The program is available for Windows, Mac and Linux computers and is a fantastic example of the quality and ease of use that the open source community is capable of developing and supporting in an ongoing fashion.
The program supports a great deal of really cool stuff, and is particularly valuable to those looking for a quick and easy way to produce audio recordings.
With this in mind I wanted to take a couple of minutes …

With thanks to Sarah Stewart for bringing this to my attention, I’ve just added a new tool to this blog called Eco-Safe, which enables you to quickly save PDF copies of the site content for offline viewing or storing.
Websites displaying the “ECO-SAFE Merit Badge” are providing environmentally friendly printing alternatives for their website visitors. As a collective group of people who use the Merit Badge, we are actively reducing the staggering number of web pages printed daily.

This clip provides an overview of the tool and a quick demonstration of how …

[For clearer viewing of this video, I recommend clicking on the monitor icon in the lower right-hand corner of the video player to view this clip full-screen.]
In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve begun to explore screencasts as a far more visual way of depicting subject matter than text or screen shots are capable of. I find they are a very effective means of explaining a process/workflow in that they enable a proper demonstration. I’m also hopeful that, once I get the workflow finalised, they can also be a …