If you’ve visited our site before, welcome back, and if you’re a first time visitor to multitrode.com, thanks for stopping by.

Why do we have a new site?

The previous site was running since 2002 and was on a technology platform (for the techies – Cold Fusion) that made it hard to do some new things we wanted to do.

Just about everyone’s familiar with that problem – usually not with running a website – but having an out-dated system slow us down or increase our workload. Most of our customer base has the frustration of large parts of their infrastructure being old and out-dated – sometimes all of it. In a recent survey we did of Florida utilities, ageing of existing infratructure was considered much more of a problem than managing any growth of the system. And across our major markets of the water & wastewater utilities in the US, UK and Australia it’s something we see every day.

The Blog

The Blog is something new for us as a company. A lot of people are very familiar with blogs, and for them blogs can often be their main source of information. For many others, the response is more “what’s a blog?”

Blog stands for – is short for – “Web log” – but really is a more informal way of communicating with the outside world.

Press releases, by their nature, tend to be fairly formal exercises and only communicate a small subset of what we would like to be saying to our customers and partners around the world.

So the idea behind us starting a blog is to have more frequent and richer communication with all the people we work with.

There’s two more great advantages of a blog – they allow and encourage responses; and it’s easy to subscribe to a blog so you can read updates, without getting your email box full of stuff you haven’t got time to read.

Let me explain a little more

If you’re like me, you use your email inbox as a tool for managing a lot of your action items. People you work with, inside and outside your company, email you and expect responses. If your inbox fills up with possibly interesting news from outside companies you get frustrated and start deleting it – even though you might want to read it if you just had a few minutes.

So getting too much email is one of the frustrations of modern working life. We’ll try not to send too much to your inbox!

Another way of keeping track of what’s going on is visiting a supplier or partner’s website every once in a while to see what’s new. It’s hard to remember what was there last time. How do you find the new content? Maybe there’s a press release about a new product or an update or a new service or a case study – but maybe there isn’t. There’s a great tool for keeping track of news, and the techies amongst you will have been using it for years. I only really started using it about 12 months ago – a news feed program.

Google Reader is what I found so easy to use, and now I can’t understand why I didn’t use newsfeeds long before. What does Google Reader do?

Basically it takes all the new content from all the websites and blogs that you subscribe to and puts it all into one place. So instead of you visiting the websites of 5 newspapers, and trawling around looking for interesting stuff, instead you can just get all of the news stories you want delivered to the reader. Maybe it doesn’t sound that great, but what you find when you start using it, is you can keep up to date with information from 50 sources very quickly. I’m currently subscribed to over 40 feeds, some of them work related, some are personal interests, and the new stuff just arrives. Some of the feeds I hardly look at, others I read most of the posts and sometimes follow all the discussions that follow if I have time. When you realise you aren’t interested in a news source any more, you just click “Unsubscribe” and it’s gone.

You can check out Google Reader very easily – at www.google.com/reader – all you need to do it create a Google account if you don’t have one, and then search for some news feeds. There’s lots of other readers around, for more on the subject take a look at the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggregator

How do you subscribe to a news source?

Usually you look for RSS (Really Simply Syndication) or a feed symbol on a webpage (see the top right of this page) – or you can simply search for the site from Google reader. When you see the RSS or feed symbol on a site you click on it and it usually offers to add the newsfeed for that site to a number of readers, including Google Reader.

Click on the +Google button..

Once you click on the Google Reader button on the right, you’ll be subscribed to that newsfeed or blog.

Try it, or any other news feed “aggregator”, and you’ll start to find that it’s the place you go to get the information you want.

Hope to see you back at the MultiTrode blog soon, there’s plenty going on that we want to share with everyone.

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