This newsletter has been published as a weekly newsletter for more than eight years. I am now delighted to announce that it is converting to a daily publication. That's right: there will be new articles published at least five days a week. You can now expect new articles to be posted Monday through Friday to both the Standard Edition and Plus Edition newsletter blogs. (If you missed my article on Blogs Explained, see http://eogn.typepad.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2004/06/blogs_explained.html.)
Every weekday I expect to publish one or more articles on the "blog" versions of this newsletter. The articles will be about the same as the past articles: a mix of genealogy software reviews, book and CD-ROM reviews, Web site information, current events in the genealogy world, various technology-related topics, and a few of my personal opinions.
Converting to a daily format allows for more timely distribution of current events and breaking news. You no longer have to wait a week for your genealogy news "fix." I also expect the new version to contain even more articles than the past weekly newsletters.
In order to read the daily editions, you will need to visit one of the two blogs (Web logs): the Standard Edition is available at http://blog.eogn.com while the Plus Edition is available at http://plus.eogn.com. (A User ID and password are required to read the Plus Edition.) Plus Edition subscribers will find even more articles, especially the in-depth articles. Plus Edition subscribers will also learn about bargains in software, hardware, and other items of interest to genealogists.
All articles are stored on the EOGN newsletter blogs for several months; there is no need to check daily if you do not want to. You can skip several days or even several weeks and yet not lose any of the articles. I expect this to be valuable in dealing with spam filters in the various mail servers. No longer are you dependent upon e-mail and its unreliability; the newsletter articles are always available to you via a Web browser or a blog newsreader at any time.
Weekly digest versions will also be sent to subscribers by e-mail. Each week, an e-mail will be sent to each Plus Edition and Standard Edition subscriber with a list of articles published in the past week. This will serve as a notice to those who do not wish to visit the blogs several times during the week. By replacing email delivery of the entire Plus Edition newsletter with this digest and pointer to the blog, Plus Edition subscribers should experience much greater success in getting their articles reliably.
NOTE: You can also use blog newsreader programs to read this newsletter's blogs. Many people find newsreaders to be much more convenient than reading blogs in a Web browser. The Standard and Plus Edition newsletters are available as RSS feeds that are used for syndication. Many Web sites now offer RSS feeds, including many major online news services.Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter – Standard Edition offers news feeds in two different formats. An RDF format news feed is available at http://eogn.typepad.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/index.rdf.
If your newsreader can read the newer Atom-format feeds, use http://eogn.typepad.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/atom.xml.If you have an interest in blog technology, you can find thousands of blogs listed at Feedster.com, Blogdigger, and at Fagan Finder's fantastic blog & RSS meta search page. Even Yahoo's search engine can find blogs in RSS format.
For more information about blogs and the various newsreaders, look at CNN at http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/03/15/new.web/index.html, the Wall Street Journal at http://www.waxy.org/random/html/wsj_findablog.html, SearchEngineWatch at http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2175281 and ExtremeTech at http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1228694,00.asp.
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