When someone talks about the capital infrastructure of a water or waste water utility or authority they are referring to things like the pipe networks, the lift stations, water mains and treatment plants a utility owns and is responsible for. These are usually very large and costly investments by any standard and that is why most times the owner of the assets must levy fees in the form of taxes when other government funds cannot be found.

Asset management is the term used to describe the management of this infrastructure in a way that minimizes total costs. These costs are made up of the cost of investment, operating costs, maintenance costs and the eventual cost of replacing the assets at the end of their life cycle.

Asset management for our customers is all about the analysis of information in order to make informed decisions about their capital investments. The better the information – the better the decision they can make. There is a big incentive to use that information on decisions that will minimize costs.

All utilities and authorities are limited in their spending to how much they collect in water and wastewater rates. Therefore a critical goal for the city is to manage their assets in such a way that they can achieve the level of service desired by customers AND meet the legal requirements of the regulators WITHOUT going over the amount of money they are allocated to spend each year.

So asset management is all about the analysis of information to make better decisions about investments. The more data you have and the more of that data you get in real time – the better you are able to manage your assets.

According to the Water Investment Newsletter the application of information technologies to the water industry is destined to become a high-growth opportunity. As if we did not know that!

Combining a modern SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system with the MultiSmart Pump Station Manager provides a sophisticated solution to asset management. This ensures not only continuous monitoring and control but a high level of predictive intelligence at the site where the assets are. Our enabling technology creates operational efficienies, and reduces maintenance and energy costs. This in turn helps the customer delay or reduces rate increases, helps bridge their funding gaps and optimizes their assets performance and reliability.

In the US much of the water infrastructure is approaching the end of its asset life cycle. This makes it a healthy candidate to get federal funding for capital renewal. We have already identified around $5billion in “shovel ready” projects that are eligible under the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Multitrode designs its products with the needs of the customer in mind. In fact one of our core values is that the customer is “Boss”. Our view is that the MultiSmart is the best solution to a customer looking for a better way to manage assets.

Some examples of how the MultiSmart delivers better Asset Management

Capital Costs: The MultiSmart is great value for money. It allows for lower cost panels. in many cases it can pay for itself in the first 12 months. The one unit replaces up to 14 other devices.

Maintenance Costs: The MultiSmart provides large amounts of data from the remote site back to a central site to be analysed. It also has on site predictive intelligence that can tell when a pump will need servicing.

Operating Costs: We know that any network where MultiSmarts are fitted will reduce after hours call outs by up to 80%. That reduces emergency response costs and “on call” costs. We also know that energy costs can be reduced by up to 15%.

Recycling: The MultiSmart has a 5 Year warranty. The case is made of recyclable plastics and the boards can be returned and disposed of in the appropriate way.

Read more…

General News

v2.1 of MultiSmart firmware is now on the website. Take a look at the recent post to find out what is included in this release.

The firmware can be downloaded if you have been given access to the firmware area. Create a login on the main site and request MultiSmart firmware (one of the checkboxes). If you already have a login, click on “Edit my details” in the top right of the main site. Read more…

General News dnp3 security, MultiSmart, PID

v2.1 of the MultiSmart Pump Station Manager will be released in the next week or two. There’s some great new features included as well as lots of small enhancements and cosmetic upgrades:

• PID control, e.g. for constant pressure, constant flow via IsaGRAF
• New comms screen making all the communications much easier to setup
• Smart Outflow calculation to cater for high inflow conditions
• Updated DNP3 security (v2)
• Time to spill calculation on the main screen
• Generator functionality (e.g., run time and starts)

More about these features in later posts.

What else is in v2.1?

Fault finding tool – you can enable DNP3 and Modbus logging on the unit, then view the log on the LCD. We’ll do a post later which shows more about how this works in practice and why it’s useful.

Pump Running by External Control – the display shows when the over-ride is running the pumps (known via contactor auxiliary or currents). The main screen shows External Run next to that pump. And the starts and hours run accumulators also update. Thanks to Todd Burnett from Coastal Process & Steve Lahm from North East Water for requesting it (and maybe others as well).

DOUT from multiple sources – you can already do with this with IsaGRAF or the logic engine, but a few customers requested being able to configure a DOUT from a number of sources without using custom logic. So the user interface lets you choose a number of sources and select the “operator” – AND, OR, XOR.

Station Outflow alarm – there are already flow alarms by pump, this has been introduced to cover the complete station.

Cosmetic improvement - holding down a softkey repeats the keypress – greatly welcomed by anyone who has configured lots of faults and digital inputs for example.

Upgrading – the DSP upgrade is automatic, so you don’t have to remember to do that after a firmware upgrade. And when you put in a CF card with an upgrade image the unit prompts you to do an update.

Extra IO blocks in LCD – the Acromag and Adam IO units weren’t fully integrated into the LCD but now have been. Previously the available IO from external units didn’t show up in some of the settings screens (only in the advanced screens), but now do.

Custom names for IsaGRAF tags – the user can rename any IsaGRAF tag as well as change values, making the process a lot more intuitive. Read more…

General News MultiSmart

Following on from the post about MultiSmart v2..

Since v2 was released there have been a few minor releases. There are lots of small features and cosmetic improvements with a few more important additions. I highlight in bold the more interesting ones, but if you are a current MultiSmart user then any one of the smaller items may be important enough for you to want to upgrade.

If you do want to see every last “ticket” (as we call them), you need to get access to the MultiSmart firmware page, which you do by creating a login on the main site and requesting access to MultiSmart firmware. (Or, if you have already signed up, login and click “Edit my details”).

2.0.1 added

• Support for Single-Phase AC Monitoring and Fault Detection – important for smaller pump stations so that the “phase fail” functionality can be included
• Integrate Acromag IO Devices into screens
• Configurable units for pump efficiency
• Efficiency calculations during an overflow
• Show DSP Version number on Info page
• Invert Analog input value
• Telstra Modem support – CDR-882SEU & CDR-780SEU

 v2.0.2 added:

• Multiple thresholds on Insulation Resistance Test (IRT) -to allow a warning and a “fault pump” value
• Level device analog compare

v2.0.3 added

• Level locked feature – to indicate faulty level device
• I2T motor protection
• Protect reset accumulators via security login
• Support for redundant IP address

v2.0.4 added:

• Remote reconfiguration of DNP points list
• Display inversion – user selectable

A reminder that you can download the latest firmware for free from the MultiTrode website. We will shortly be releasing v2.1, so there will be a post about the main features in 2.1 very shortly. Read more…

General News

When you find useful stuff on the web, it can be hard to keep track of it all. You can bookmark it, and in Internet Explorer (or another browser), you assign it to a folder.

Later, you have some memory of a useful website that you found but when you look in a likely folder under your bookmarks there are 50 links. Is it there? It’s hard to be interested enough to find it, so you do another Google search and start over..

I started experimenting with Diigo (www.diigo.com) a few days ago.

Diigo is one of many “social bookmarking” websites but seems to have some handy add ons.

What’s a social bookmarking website anyway? They are websites that let you share interesting websites with friends or colleagues.

What diigo offers which makes it more interesting – even if you aren’t interested in any sharing, is you can:

• highlight a section (or sections) of a webpage
• pin a post it note with your comments
• save it to your Diigo bookmarks with one or more tags

The tags concept lets you create your own categories and later search for the bookmarks under these categories.

It’s a simple solution to the problem that anyone who uses Windows Explorer to store files has found – you can only store a file in one location so later, you might try 5 different places to find what you are looking for. If instead you can tag up a website with a few different keywords you have much more chance of searching for it – and finding it – later.

Here’s an example below:

Commenting on and highlighting a section of a website

If you go to www.diigo.com and sign up you can add the diigo toolbar to IE (or Firefox). The toolbar lets you easily highlight and add your sticky notes or comments to a site – and to review all the websites you have bookmarked.

I’m on diigo as “stevecarson”. I’m going to try it out some more and see how it works for the sharing side.. Read more…

General News

Some people might be interested in the latest MultiSmart brochure now on the main website.

You can find it under the MultiSmart section of the website, at www.multitrode.com/pump-station-manager/data-sheets.html

Some people prefer to read a “real paper” version, so you can always ask your local MultiTrode sales office to give you a copy.

We like to encourage less paper but the reason we printed a few thousand is that we know it’s not an easy shift to have everything as a soft copy and not print it out.

Multismart-brochure

General News

This continues from the earlier DNP3 posts -

Part One: Date/Time Stamping – or Less Guessing
Part Two: Communications Options – Polling and Unsolicited Reporting
Part Three: Security

The DNP3 protocol also supports guaranteed delivery. What does this mean?

Suppose you want to send a command to start a pump. How do you know the RTU at site received the command? With some older and simpler protocols the only way to check is to read the status of the pump at a slightly later time – and hope you catch it in the act.

Or suppose you want to ensure that the message High level alarm or All pumps unavailable sent from the RTU was not missed by the master station or SCADA? With some protocols, like Modbus, there isn’t any mechanism for ensuring this.

DNP3 provides message acknowledgements. With unsolicited reporting, the RTU might send all changed data every half hour, or if the event buffer was full. The “message” that the DNP3 protocol sends includes all the tags that have changed with the date/time of each, and also includes a sequence number. The master station would send an acknowledgement to the RTU – or “outstation” – that that sequence number had been received.

In the event that the RTU / outstation didn’t get that confirmation, it would retry. And after a certain time period the site would go into a Comms Fail mode with probably a longer retry delay. I say “probably” because that depends on how the user sets it up, but that would be the sensible approach.

As you can see if you’ve been following this series on DNP3, the creators of DNP3 designed it for the challenging world of telemetry where communications is always suspect and often problematic.

There’s more to configure in the protocol of course, but each element is there to ensure data integrity:

• you know what happened
• exactly when it happened
• you can guarantee that the SCADA system knows about it
• and you can ensure that data is genuine and not from a hacker

Read more…

General News DNP3, reliability, RTU, SCADA, telemetry

We only launched the blog a month ago, so for people following the blog it seems worth doing a catch up on recent history.

v2.0 of Multismart was released in July 2008 and came with some major enhancements.

PLC functionality

IsaGRAF v5 was added in as an option to the product. This means that a full IEC61131-3 compliant PLC extension is available (all 5 languages).

How does it integrate and when is it needed?

First thing to mention is that the code behind MultiSmart is NOT written in a PLC language. It’s in C++ for a whole bunch of reasons that I hope to get our software team to elaborate on at a slightly later date.

What MultiSmart does do is make ALL of the many tags (1000’s) available to the PLC module for reading and writing. This then allows a PLC programmer to extend, change or add totally new modules, without having to rewrite the complete application or module from scratch.

Praveen wrote a post recently about a customer who wanted to match dosing of SulfaLock to the flow rate for odor control. It’s such a custom requirement that you wouldn’t expect to find it in the standard list of MultiSmart functions! So Praveen developed it for the customer in IsaGRAF. The customer or his SI could have done the same, so it’s not dependant on MultiTrode engineering staff writing the application. Of course, we like doing custom applications because it’s a great opportunity to learn more.

Another PLC application would be testing a high level alarm in a specific way – turning the pumps off periodically, letting the level rise, and ensuring the high level alarm actually operated. That’s a function that we might include as standard at some stage, but I’m sure you get the idea.

How might that work?  The PLC application would interface to the pump controller module - maybe based on date/time and certain other conditions being met (low flow rates, no pump alarms last 3 days), and turn the pumps off, then monitor the level to where the high level alarm should activate. If it does activate, start the pumps, send a “High level alarm check ok” signal to SCADA and reset the high level alarm. If it doesn’t activate, still start the pumps (!), send a “High level alarm FAIL” signal to SCADA and reset the high level alarm.

There is a lot of functionality in MultiSmart so a challenge for us is educating our customer base as to what’s there so someone doesn’t spend a week or two rewriting something we have already done and tested..

Another enhancement in v2 is to be able to view all tags on the LCD screen, including IsaGRAF tags and the entire tag database (go to the Info screen on MultiSmart) – makes on-site troubleshooting a lot easier!

DNP3 Security

The new standard for DNP3 security was out so we included it in MultiSmart v2. There’s a big concern about security in SCADA communications so we moved it to the top of our queue. You can find out more in this DNP3 Security post.

More Expandable I/O

We added some off the shelf I/O blocks and integrated them into the user interface. Why 3rd party I/O modules? Standard I/O is pretty much a commodity these days so there are plenty of great modules out there. We added two Adam units from Advantech, and in 2.01 added two UL-listed Acromag units. They connect on Ethernet using Modbus TCP protocol.

What we’ve done in MultiSmart I/O is focus on specific pump station requirements, so even though the most common I/O card you find in MultiSmart has 2x 4-20mA Analog inputs, 1x 4-20mA Analog output, 7 Digital outputs and 20 Digital inputs – there are some extras. The Digital inputs as default are volt-free contact closure inputs but can also be configured to read Flygt FLS, PTC thermistors, seal sensors, conductive probe inputs (for the MultiTrode probe), and a few can be configured to be Flygt CLS or high speed counters. The card also includes 3 inputs for reading phase-to-phase supply directly – up to 600v input.

And the energy and pump efficiency card reads 3-phase currents, and provides insulation resistance. Reading all this I/O usually means you have to buy lots of parts to do the signal conditioning. So most people don’t do it and spend lots of time driving to site to see what’s going on..

All of these pump station specific I/O makes the control panel, simpler, more intelligent, smaller – and of course lower cost.

But when it came to another card for 8x standard AINs or 16x standard Digital Inputs we thought why not just a card from someone else?

Import and export of DNP3 and Modbus tags

You can now export the DNP3 and Modbus tags as a .csv file and save it onto the CF card – or read it via ftp. And you can re-import the tag list back after modifying it.

This matters because as a default there are 400-500 tags in MultiSmart and if you want to play around with that configuration it takes a while through the user interface. Also you might want to synchronize data with a SCADA configuration file or master PLC.

Energy Monitoring and Energy Saving

v2 includes “Run the most efficient pump”, also known as “Alternation by efficiency”

This allows automatic saving of energy. You set a parameter for the ratio to run – e.g. run the most efficient pump 20:1 compared with the other pump(s). If it just ran the most efficient pump, the system could never get an opportunity to recheck – or to check the other pump runs ok.

How much do pumps drop in efficiency? I.e. how much can you save? It’s one of those values that people rarely know. As one major pump supplier said to us, “We all know the pump curve the day it leave the factory, but 1 year, 3 years later, what is it like? No one knows” They showed us a study they had done but it’s confidential. We did put some studies that we found on the Energy & Environment page on our main site, which indicated that wastewater pumps were often more than 15% below their original efficiency. Even clean water pumps can degrade significantly – always a surprise.

So the Run most efficient pump feature gives a change to automatically and easily save energy costs.

Other features

There’s a couple of other minor features:

• Digital Output pulse and delay functionality
• Support for relative level

How do I get v2?

Easy. I’m assuming you have a MultiSmart of course. If you don’t, and you have a lift station, try one out!

If you do, you can download the firmware for FREE from the multitrode.com website. You can find the link under the Training and Support section at http://www.multitrode.com/firmware-upgrades.php

You will need to signup on the site. If you don’t already have a login, just click the Signup button in the top right (of the main website), and check the box – Please give me access to the free MultiSmart firmware upgrades & release information. If you do already have a login and haven’t been in the MultiSmart firmware access section before, make sure you are logged in and click the Edit my account details link, then check the MultiSmart firmware access box.

We process that request manually so it usually takes a day, sometimes less - but if you are in a hurry you can always call up your MultiTrode office and speed things up.

How do I find out about New Versions?

Easy. Follow this blog. If you haven’t already subscribed just click the Subscribe by RSS    or Subscribe by Email icon in the top right. Find out about Subscribe by RSS.

Alternatively, or as well, to make sure you don’t miss anything, in the instructions above (”How do I get v2?”) about editing your login details to the MultiTrode site, you can check the box Please update me on email with all new releases of software or hardware in the MultiTrode family of products (MultiSmart/PumpView/Outpost2).

If you are a MultiSmart customer it’s well worth finding out the details of all the new features. It’s free to upgrade!

More about some minor MultiSmart updates since v2 in a later post.. Read more…

General News dnp3 security, isagraf, plc, pump efficiency

The magazine Control Engineering ran their monthly Information Control email today which included a tutorial from MultiTrode and Parasyn:

www.controleng.com/article/CA6640186.html 

They describe the tutorial:

SCADA systems aren’t scalable out of the box; you have to plan with the final footprint in mind,” says Tony Poole, managing director of Parasyn, a system integrator specializing in water/waste water applications. Steve Carson is with MultiTrode, a manufacturer of MultiSmart pump station manager units, which are replacement devices for pump controllers or PLCs/RTUs for lift stations. The devices add more monitoring and control capability to SCADA systems, and can also add 400 to 500 tags (data points) per site. In this tutorial, Carson and Poole provide best-practice advice for designing large tag count SCADA systems so they are manageable.”

Control Engineering  have a number of email newsletters that you can subscribe to. There’s plenty of good quality articles that make it worth the free subscription. Just visit http://www.controleng.com and you will see the Newsletters menu item on their site.

There’s a story behind how we came to write that article together, a subject for another day.

We find the subject of large tag count systems very interesting – we’ve run into it a number of times and in different elements of the SCADA solution. Parasyn’s approach made a lot of sense when they explained it to us and we certainly learnt from their experience.

“SCADA systems aren’t scalable out of the box; you have to plan with the final footprint in mind,” says Tony Poole, managing director of Parasyn.

Have a read of the article. It will be in the print edition of Control Engineering  in April. Read more…

General News large tag count, reporting, SCADA, telemetry

We’ve been working with Flovac for quite a while. Our relationship started off with them using our older controller - the MT2PC (actually a pair of MT2PCs) for their vacuum pump stations. They’ve now standardized on the MultiSmart Pump Station Manager and there’s a News item on the main MultiTrode website.

There’s a great 3 minute video about how vacuum pumping works on their home page, www.flovac.com

John Radinoff, the Flovac Managing Director, explained to me why vacuum pumping is gaining ground: ”These systems are used in areas difficult to sewer using traditional technologies. Ideally suited for areas with high water table, rocky sites or flat ground, the system has proven to be extremely economical in such topography. 
Eliminating infiltration and exfiltration, vacuum sewerage is highly regarded by many EPA’s around the world and has proven to be the sewerage technology with the lowest carbon footprint. This is the reason why it is the naturally preferred choice of sewerage in high profile sustainable projects like Masdar in the UAE.”

It’s clear that gravity sewer is really expensive when you have  a high water table, rocky terrain or very low density housing.

There’s a good Wikipedia article about vaccum pumping.

Pressure sewer technology covers a similar list of advantages over gravity sewer.

For MultiSmart, the Flovac application is a 4-pump 2-well configuration. The “wells” are independent. On one side we are measuring the vacuum pressure and based on that starting and stopping the pair of vacuum pumps. On the liquid side, we are measuring the liquid level in the well and starting and stopping the wastewater pumps. Read more…

General News environmental, user interface, vacuum pumping

The story starts with some rats, quite a while ago.

One of our customers came to see us and together we had a few technical discussions about how to improve the single sensor probe and the MTR relay as an independent high level backup system.

The problem they had encountered was that rats had eaten the probe cable in a number of sites. When the probe isn’t covered by conductive liquid (e.g. wastewater) it registers as an open circuit. When the cable is broken, disconnected, or the target of hungry rodents it also registers as an open circuit. So the high level wasn’t picked up – a major problem.

Their idea was to bring an extra wire from the sensor in the level probe to the alarming relay and have the relay carry out a continuity check.

It seemed like a great idea. When we talked some more about the idea we first proposed one alarm output for both high level and for loss of probe. I think we were trying to work out if we could re-use most of an older product for the new design. That idea didn’t work for them for good reason – their PLC/RTU control system would start the pumps on a high level alarm and run them for a set period, but if the alarm signal was only indicating loss of probe, the well could be almost empty and they might run the pumps dry and airlock them. Then lots of work getting the pumps into service again!

So the product concept became a level alarm relay with two outputs – one for loss of probe, and one for high level.

Like many product companies we then had lots more ideas for other variants, and with all the MultiSmart work we were doing at the time, the product took a lot longer than it should to make it out the door.

Well, we released the SafeSmart level alarm relay today. The part number is Safe-FS.

Read more…

General News failsafe probe, high level alarm, safesmart

A reminder for those who aren’t aware – if you have a MultiSmart you can get FREE software upgrades for the life of the product. This applies to any end-user or system integrator or contractor working for the end-user.

If you haven’t already registered on the MultiTrode website, all you have to do is click on the SignUp box in the top right on the main multitrode.com site:

When you get the member registration form, don’t forget to select the box which says: “Please give me access to the free MultiSmart firmware upgrades..” – see below..

If you have already registered on the new multitrode.com website and didn’t select this option at the time - but do want access to MultiSmart firmware, just send an email to webmaster@multitrode.com requesting an upgrade – best to include a phone number where we can contact you.

Specification Document Update for v2.0.4

Part of the reason for this post was to let people know that the specification document has been updated for MultiSmart.

The specification document generally has two main audience groups – those who want a chance to review the main features of a product – to understand what the product offers; and, those who want to write that functionality into a specification for a bid document.

The new MultiSmart spec document is relevant for v2.0.4 onwards of MultiSmart, and includes functionality like “locked level detection” - a subject of a future blog post.

v2.0.4 was released in December 2008. If you don’t have a copy and you are a MultiSmart end-user, or an SI or contractor for an end-user, please register on our website as described above. 

How can you get hold of the spec document? Visit http://www.multitrode.com/pump-station-manager/specifying.html to find the latest pdf and word copies. 

If you are looking for specifications for any MultiTrode product, simply navigate to that product by clicking Products & Software, then find the product you are looking for and select the Specifying link.

And if you stumbled across this blog post and want to know how to get future blogs without having to remember to visit the website 10 times a month – simply subscribe. If you are already reading this blog post in a reader (like Google Reader or Feedburner) then it looks like you are already ok. If you are reading this on our website, just click on one of the two links at the top right of this blog – subscribe by email – OR, better, subscribe by RSS (less clogged email inbox). Read more…

General News Add new tag, Technical

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. Read more…

General News