Feeds and Speeds

RSS, famously known as "real simple syndication," is everywhere.

Those little orange XML and RSS buttons are becoming ubiquitous on many sites, and My Sun Connection is no exception. By subscribing to an RSS feed, you can obtain the latest updates from your favorite web sites, without having to log in to the site directly.

When new content is available, it arrives in your RSS-enabled client in a simple, summarized form.

We're excited about delivering content to you in RSS, because it's a great way to help keep you up-to-date and informed. An example is the Sun Alerts feed--important notifications about patches to correct issues affecting system availability and security.

We're encouraged by the number of folks who have subscribed, and we're looking forward to doing a lot more with RSS on My Sun Connection, too.

If you're interested in using RSS to deliver news, updates and other content to your customers and partners, or just want to learn more, check out these resources:

• RSS: Lightweight Web Syndication is an excellent overview of RSS.
  
• The RSS DevCenter is a collection of articles related to RSS.
  
• RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters is a good brief technical overview
  

Perusing a Portlet

Good news: the access problems have been resolved. Phew.

Now, on to a topic I love to discuss, the My Downloads portlet.

Like most portals, My Sun Connection is made up of portlets, a nifty way to organize and display information in your Web browser. The My Downloads portlet is a great example of aggregating useful information in one place.

Plus, it's highly interactive -- asynchronous JavaScript with XML, or AJAX, makes this possible.

The technology is cool, but what it lets you do is more important. You can quickly scan forums, blogs, and links to related Web pages for your Sun products without having to wait for page reloads:

Neat, huh? Saving time is good.

Next, we need to make sure the content displayed is what you need to get your job done successfully. We're working on improvements (stay tuned), and we'd love to hear your ideas and suggestions, too.