Here is a demonstration of simple web-centric tools at work - tools that enable you to build your local IT environment is a way best suited to your immediate needs.

For example, keeping up to date with events around us is facilitated if we can build a desktop with summaries of new stuff. RSS feeds provide a perfect resource for feeding our up-to-the-minute-desktop - whether with headlines or with recent lab results or with student homework assignments. The Provost's office publishes each week, an Academic Affairs update which is added to the office site, abstracted with an RSS feed and displayed on the from my desk link.

Below is a short demo of RSS feeds and building an informative and up-to-date desktop. There is a cron job that hourly schedules remote rss access and two primary tool scriptss:

• acquiring the RSS feed (CRON job) (Apologies for the hard wired links and files. It would be better for the script to be table driven, with a nice cgi for adding, editing and deleting entries in the table - waiting for a rainy day to do the next version)
• Download the RSS object (get_rss.pl)
• generating, on request, the html from the RSS object (rss_box.cgi) for inclusion in your web page.

<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/RSS/rss_box?rdf=it_garage.rdf"-->
<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/RSS/rss_box?rdf=slashdot.rdf"-->
<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/RSS/rss_box?rdf=reuters_news.cgi"-->