Into The Unknown

Have you struggled at the hands of outdated or vague psyBNC setup guides? psyBNC is a wonderful application, but it's like flailing about in a dark room trying to find the lightswitch if you've not done it before. So, I spent a couple of hours writing up my experiences (and a guide for others) for setting up and configuring a psyBNC shell, from scratch, for multiple networks - the article is on my personal blog.

I was compelled to write it because the existing tutorials, FAQs and guides are all over the place in terms of accuracy and legibility - hopefully my step-by-step guide will be easy enough to follow that anybody can just equip themselves with a couple of basic tools and be up and running within 15 minutes.

It's published under a CC licence, so do as you will with it! As the readership of my personal blog is quite small, I thought crossposting it to here be of some use - If it helps you, post back in the comments! The full link to the tutorial is http://kerblam.co.uk/2008/04/definitive-2008-guide-to-multi-network.php. Enjoy :)

PS - when I get handy enough with psyBNC scripting, I'll post up some of my scripts and write another little reference to help newbie coders. It's not got a great scripting engine, but you can code in some useful shortcuts to speed up your daily goings-on. I'm still learning the ropes, but it's not too tough to understand the basic syntax. Why don't you have a go in the meantime!

What with all the fancy technologies and acronyms whirling around the web (and your head) at the moment, it's easy to get lost in the simpler things that help the Web work. One of those things is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication.

The whole concept of RSS really opened up the ability to take data from multiple sources, repurpose it and repackage it for an entirely different end result - and developers love it. Today, RSS is definitely one of the web's core features. It's the ability to take feeds from sites - and there's agreed formats (several of which are the de-facto standards) in which this data is published for the benefit of all to aggregate, remix, mashup... Who couldn't like that kind of thing? Projects like Yahoo Pipes just make the concept even more accessible for end users, meaning that what was once the preserve of hard-core coders is now accessible by everyone. And isn't that what the Web's about?

Arguably, the most commonly-recognised formats are Atom and RSS - you'll usually find links to both of these formats of feeds on all the most popular web sites. Don't worry if you don't understand the principle behind RSS, because I still don't quite have my head around the finer points of the format! And this is where this Cheatsheet starts to come in handy... If you're struggling with your RSS understanding though, don't worry - it's not as hard as you'd think. In fact, the principles behind RSS are really quite nice and simple once you understand the buzzwords.

So, if you want to brush up on your tech knowledge, Commoncraft have put together a nice little tutorial for everybody - just watch this handy little video guide: "RSS in plain English" and all will be revealed. If you want to download it for future viewing, you can do that too.