Category Archives: Cloud

Using RSS to Tame the Information Overload

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RSS you say? Whaaat? Well actually RSS is quite possibly one of the most underestimated tools on the web but also one of the most useful.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and that’s really it explained literally in a nutshell. Its had several other names including ‘RDF Site Summary’ and laterly, ‘Rich Site Summary’ but WhatIsRSS website have an easy to understand summary:

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually.

So what does that actually mean, in laymans terms? Well, if you’re anything like me you visit a LOT of websites on a daily basis for news, football results, technology updates, shopping, travel bargains, classified ads, anything you can think of. Its time consuming isn’t it?

You don’t want to be having to remember all those URL’s off by heart so you add them as bookmarks, but then you still have to find the bookmark in your browser, click on the link and then scroll thru the latest posts on the website. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

No longer do users have to go find content; now it can come to them automatically.  What if you could bookmark all your favourite websites, have something pull in all the new content as it happens and have it arranged all neatly on one page?

That’s RSS for you. See ninety-nine percent of any websites you visit and you’ll see that familiar little orange square. Like the BBC News website for example,

The ubiquitous RSS logo  What do I need to do to read an RSS Feed? 

Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allows you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use. Probably the most universal of all RSS readers at the moment is  Google Reader which is my web-based reader of choice which is complimented by the FeedDemon desktop reader which syncs with Google for offline reading.

Here in the office we can, fire up literally in seconds  either reader and catch up with all our niche news feeds on cloud storage, the web hosting industry, web development, social media and cloud technology services, etc without any heavy lifting!

There’s an excellent and easy to follow screencast from Andy Wibbles (click on the image below) that really nails it if you’re a complete Google RSS reader newbie.

How-to-Use-Google-Reader

More than anything it is a massive time saver and the other thing that an RSS reader enables you to do is to skim the headlines on a website, so you only have to click on the news that is of interest. You can save anything of lesser importance til later.

Creating feed folders allows you to organize by topic, geography or any way that you prefer.  For example, when I’m in a hurry I usually go straight to my “Web Hosting” news folder, leaving others unread for a later time. If you’re not using folders and have all the news sources stacked up one after another on the left sidebar, you are wasting a lot of time!

Naturally the RedGalaxy blog feed should be one of the first you add to your reader!

Web Hosting Evolution and the Cloud

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At RedGalaxy Ltd, we like to make sure our customers have everything they need for their web presence. From hosting to web development to online marketing, we work to your requirements. Another thing we wanted to do is too demystify the whole process of hosting, domains and cloud data storage, which is one of the reasons we started our blog. We want to point you in the right direction and explain some of the finer points, which, by the very nature of this industry, do tend to get buried in tech speak at times!

the evolution of web hosting, infographic

So, one of the most recent(ish) web developments is the avalanche of infographics which in recent months have visualised everything from the music industry’s dramatically sliding profits to an explanation of the explosion of Pinterest, the latest social media sharing sensation.

Which is quite apt seeing as Pinterest was where we came across this very excellent infographic form Peer 1, ‘The Evolution of Web Hosting’ which documents the history and development of web hosting over the last 20 years which has come a long way from the days when you needed to purchase and manage your own computer or server to host a website. Today, you can find web hosting services from thousands of web hosting providers for a fraction of the cost.

How big is the web hosting industry? Well, cloud services alone in the UK made up around 7.5% of the £8 billion software market back in 2010. Google searches for ‘web-hosting’ are now in decline, fast being overtaken by searches for ‘cloud-hosting’. The reach of web host services continues to increase in a market that is forecast to expand, worldwide by 2015 to 3 billion users.

Look out too for an increase in buzz words like ‘cloud Iaas’, cloud infrastructure as a service.

 

A Refresher Course in Cloud Storage

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Back in the 90s ‘the cloud’ (the trendy new moniker) was simply called online storage and services like the (now defunct) X-Drive offered a whopping 200MB of space. These days the cloud is crowded with free and paid services, some you have heard of, some you haven’t, offering anything from free 2GB accounts to enterprise sized 1TB+ capacity cloud space. If there is one solution they are all selling its security, accessibility and convenience.

Online_storage_history_red_galaxy_cambridge

  One thing we do recommend to everyone, whether they use RedGalaxy online backup services or any one of our many competitors, don’t, under any circumstances use a free service for anything you value and want to keep secure. As much as we love the availability of free storage services, using the free cloud is almost akin to putting your money in a bank and leaving the door open.

If you have data – photos, documents, business files… anything you consider important, it is always a good idea to have at least one backup copy of those files. Ideally, your backup should be kept away from the originals.

Wikipedia sum up ‘cloud computing’ in a concise explanation thus:

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).

After the dot-com bubble, Amazon played a key role in the development of cloud computing by modernising their data centers, which, like most computer networks were only using something like 10% of their capacity.

red-galaxy-cloud services

Image thanks to Wikipedia Commons

   Online backup from RedGalaxy works by creating an FTP connection to our backup servers and either manually uploading files using an FTP client such as FileZilla, or automatically connecting and uploading your files using dedicated backup software, capable of connecting to FTP servers, something like Syncback is a popular choice.

The advantages of cloud computing are many, including lower infrastructure costs and easy maintenance.  Cloud also helps save the environment. You can define cloud computing as a pay-per-use model for enabling on-demand access to reliable and manageable services. Another way to describe this type of cloud storage service is SaaS (Software as a Service) which put simply is basically a backup service that offers a software to help people back up their data.