Frequently Asked Questions
- What are feeds?
- Feeds allow you to see when web sites have added new content. You can get the latest headlines in one place, as soon as its published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from. Feeds are also known as RSS. There is some debate as to what RSS stands for, but most people opt for 'Really Simple Syndication'. In essence, the feeds themselves are just web pages, designed to be read by computers rather than people.
- Why should I care about feeds?
- The advantages of RSS are quite simple: They save time and bandwidth. Instead of remembering to visit a favorite site, the news comes directly to you at whatever interval you want. More importantly, RSS gives you control over receiving information you want without revealing information about yourself. Unlike subscribing to an e-mail newsletter, you never have to give out your e-mail address with an RSS feed. That avoids the possibility of receiving spam or unwanted junk e-mail from the web site.
- Who publishes feeds?
- Anyone that publishes on the web can publish a feed. You can pretty much count on the biggest names on the web offering feeds. Some examples are USA TODAY, BBC News, ABC News, CNET, Yahoo! and many more. In addition, hundreds of thousands of "smaller" sites publish feeds to keep themselves better connected to their readers/listeners/admirers/critics.
- How do I find feeds?
- It's safe to say you already know the web sites you visit regularly so finding their feeds is pretty easy. Go to their home page and do an inline search in your browser (usually Command-F for Macs, Ctrl-F for PCs) for "RSS" or "Subscribe". You're looking for a link that takes you to a page that looks somewhat like this RSS feed from Yahoo! You'll then copy/paste that URL into your LaunchComplexTM account. Check out the screencast where I walk you through the process, it's really easy.
- I don't quite understand what this app does, is there a demo?
- Absolutely, check out a live demo right here. It's a sample account populated with links to various topics. The top navigation has been disabled in the demo, only the blue links work.
- How does it all work?
- Check out the screencast, I'll walk you through everything from registering an account, to logging in, to managing your account, to using the site, to recovering your password if you forget it. It's all super easy, I promise!
- Can I have more than nine (9) feeds in my account?
- Not right now. The more feeds you have, coupled with more users, the slower the site is (as the server just has to parse more information, more often). Keep in mind you can change your feeds at any time so if you find one or two aren't as fresh as you'd like, you can change them, or remove them. You're in complete control.
- Is there any way I can make my page load faster?
- Reduce the number of feeds on your page. The more feeds you have (as well as concurrent users), the more information the server has to fetch/parse/format. If you have 9 feeds but really only use 6 of them, remove the 3 you don't really use.
- My links don't seem to change that often? Is the site working?
- Yes, LaunchComplexTM is working fine - you'll know it isn't when none of your feeds show up. For this particular issue, unfortunately, there's not much you can do except perhaps look for fresher feeds. The reason being is some feeds are just more stale than others. Some feeds are updated every X minutes, others hourly, others a couple times a day, others once a day, others once a week, others maybe a couple times a month. It all depends on the content owner and how often they publish content.
- One of my feeds doesn't show up
- Most likely there is a problem on the side we're grabbing the feed from (it's them, not us). You'd know there's a problem on this end if none of your feeds showed up. When LaunchComplexTM goes down, everything goes down :) To resolve your issue, don't do anything other than give it a little time, it usually fixes itself as things are corrected on the originating end. Sometimes feed urls change as well, so if you're still seeing this issue after a couple days you might want to go back to where you found the feed and check that the URL is still the same. I've personally had to update the URL of one of my feeds.
- I've forgotten my password, can you send it to me?
- Unfortunately, no. Passwords are one-way encrypted, meaning I can't recover it in plain text to send to you. This is done for security purposes. But don't worry, you can reset your password yourself. Here's how: Go to www.launchcomplex.com and in the gray login box, click on the forgot password link. Enter your e-mail address and a new password will be e-mailed to you. Log in with that new password and then immediately change your password to something more memorable.