I have created an RSS feed that contains all the best driving tips in one place. This feed includes safe driving tips and ways to save gas. I hope you will find it useful. If you drive a lot- for work or pleasure- you will find the information in this RSS feed to be useful. I will also keep this feed updated with the current mileage reimbursement rate.

I understand why. Many businesses don’t understand the web and its potential, let alone features like RSS. They put a website up because they are “supposed to” or want to somehow appeal to younger demographics. I think most companies are getting wiser to the potential of a good website but they are still missing out.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication,” which is a good description but still might leave a novice in the dark. Basically RSS is a means of communication to people who are interested in what you have to say that is automatically delivered to them in any way they choose. Conventional advertising with television and newspapers, for example, are like a net that is spread open widely in hopes of catching some of the fish that are around. RSS, on the other hand, is like a worm on a hook that fish get because they are interested in.

What could you do with a marketing conduit that directly addressed people who are specifically interested in your product? What could you do with your customers if you had a way to directly and specifically communicate to them the latest news about your services? These are some of the things a good RSS feed can do for you. Here are some more.

Dizzysoft.com would like to help your company set up its RSS services. Just contact us with your needs and we will get you started.

You can also subscribe to the dizzysoft.com RSS feed to get more innovative ideas like this one.

You’ll have to visit FuelMeUp.com to get a list of gas prices. Notice that the gas stations are listed neatly in a consistently formatted table. Since the content we are interested in is formatted so cleanly, we can use one of the many web to RSS sites to scrape the data and convert it into an RSS feed. There is a lot of extraneous information on this page, that we aren’t interested in for this purpose, but if we click “Show All Stations” at the bottom of the page, we will only get the information we want.

In the past I’ve used page2rss to convert web pages to RSS feeds. I really pleased with how quickly this site updates me with a change to a page. If we use the “Show All Stations” page and give it to page2rss, we will be notified any time something changes here- even if its some of the information we are not interested in (such as formatting). Here’s an example of this feed for my zip code in Lake Wylie, SC.

If we want to be a little more specific we can turn to RSSxl. There we can enter the “Show All Stations” address and (after viewing the source code from the page) give a beginning and ending string for each item in the feed. In this case I used <tr (notice the missing >) for the beginning of the item and </tr> for the end. This produces a feed with the store’s name, address, and current price, as well as the date. On top of that we have a few extra characters ("Update Gas Prices") left over from the page, where you might tell the site the latest info. Here’s the feed this site creates for my home in Lake Wylie, SC.

If we turn to Feed43 we can cut out the rest of this extraneous information. With a little knowledge of HTML, and a few minutes to follow their tutorial, we can get only the information we are interested in and convert it into an RSS feed. We can also give the feed a unique title (besides the name of the web page that the other sites automatically sets). The best part of this is that Feed43 gives you a link to edit this feed later- something none of the other web page to RSS feed conversion sites offer. This makes it easy to “fix” a feed when the site changes formatting. Here’s the feed for my hometown.

Once we have a feed we can decide how we want to retrieve it. I have a copy of the feed in my blog reader, to check at from home. I also have a copy of this feed sent to my cell phone by SMS- so I can stay up to date while on the road.

After writing this post I realized that this was still generating too much information. What I really want to know is, “who has the cheapest gas in town?” and not, “what is every gas station charging for gas?” With a little tweaking, I changed the Feed43 feed to only produce one station- the top station listed, which will always be the cheapest Gas station. Now I can compare other stations with the cheapest gas and decide if it is worth traveling to the cheapest station.

When I use this feed, and keep track of my deductible miles with Mileage on my Palm handheld I save even more money!

You can stay informed with the latest news about Dizzysoft products and projects by subscribing to our RSS feed.

This is good news for people who have moved from a Palm OS Treo device to an iPhone. Now they can continue to use their faithful programs on the new phone. Additionally this gives iPhone users access to even more programs for their phone.

The variety and quality of programs for Palm devices has always been an advantage of the product. Early in its history Palm encouraged independent developers to write programs. As a result thousands of programs (like Dizzysoft’s programs) were written to fill in every conceivable need for the user. This is exactly why I started writing my first (and most successful program, Mileage). There was no useful program for me to keep track of my business mileage available that served my needs. I spent a couple of years to write a stable and flexible program that eventually was used by tens of thousands of people.

This emulator was created by the same people who brough you the Palm OS emulator for Windows Mobile, allowing Windows mobile users to have access to the same large and varied possible programs.

Both of these programs are available from StyleTap.com. Please Note: I have not tested the Dizzysoft products on this platform as of the posting of this article.

You can stay up to date with the various dizzysoft products by subscribing to the dizzysoft RSS feed.