Ah.  The TLA.  Where would world be without the ever expanding list of cryptic three letter acronyms (that usually aren’t acronyms anymore or no one can agree on what they mean).  Cases in point, OPC and RSS.  We all know the story behind OPC.  RSS has a couple of meanings, but commonly is referred to as Really Simple Syndication.  So what is it all about?  Anyone who has been following Jim Cahill’s blog, knows he’s been on the soapbox quite a bit about this very useful technology.  Personally I wish I had a nickel for every hour I’ve spent over the years trawling websites and blogs for information.

Well no more.  Now I subscribe to the feeds I’m interested in, and filter the notifications that come in.   An RSS feed (or XML feed, syndicated content or whatever you choose to call it) usually sends updated content from new sites or blogs, but they can also be used to deliver MP3 content, like podcasts.  All you need is a Reader of some sort.  Both Firefox and IE7 have embedded RSS capabilities, but personally I like to use a separate aggregator.  I did try using the Outlook option with IE7, but I like to keep my e-mail and my news items separate.  I’m a digital packrat as it is, so I don’t need to add thousands of feed headlines to my gargantuan mail archives.  

Looks like my crusade to get more people in our office using RSS is starting to pay off.   For the last couple of weeks I’ve been test driving the new MatrikonOPC NewsReader that is now being offered for free download off the website.  It’s got a few cool features I really like.

• SmartFeeds:  which let you set up custom feeds that filter and/or aggregate other feeds.  Like one to sum up all Unread news, all OPC news, etc

• Per Feed Notifications:  you can set up on a per feed basis on whether or not to receive the notifications.  Another cool feature is if your screensaver is active or the box is locked, the notifications are paused, so you don’t miss new item notifications if your not around.

• Article Tags:  you can add multiple tags to articles to better categorize information.

These are on top of all the standard type features you’d expect, customizable nested folders, simple 2 or 3 pane layout, sorting options, single click access, etc.

Almost all of the industrial automation and OPC related sites I used to visit offer RSS feeds.  (Including this blog of course!).  OPCConnect.com has a ‘recent update’ feed which is nice.  I’m still waiting for the OPC Foundation to get that going on their site.  (I’m sure it’s in the queue, but everyone is quite busy with the OPC UA development work.)

So, if your ETA for getting your OPC news via an RSS or XML feed is TBD, then you better change it PDQ or you could be SOL.  TTFN