Wireless Home Networking - Index of

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Part V: The Part of Tens
CNET.com
CNET.com (www.cnet.com) is a simple-to-use, free Web site where you can
do apples-to-apples comparisons of wireless equipment. You can count on
finding pictures of what you’re buying, editor ratings of the equipment, user
ratings of the gear, reviews of most devices, and a listing of the places on the
Web where you can buy it all — along with true pricing. What’s great about
CNET is that it covers the wireless networking aspect of Wi-Fi as well as
the consumer goods portion of Wi-Fi (such as home theater, A/V gear, and
phones). It’s your one-stop resource for evaluating your future home
wireless purchases.
Get started at CNET in its Wi-Fi Networking section, which at the time this
book was written was at http://reviews.cnet.com/networking-wifi/?tag=co.
There, you find feature specs, reviews, and price comparisons of leading
wireless gear. (CNET even certifies listed vendors, so you know that they
pass at least one test of online legitimacy.)
What we especially like is the ability to do a side-by-side comparison so that
we can see which product has which features. By clicking the boxes next to
each name, you can select that gear for comparison shopping. You can also
filter the results by price, features, support, and other factors at the bottom
of the page. Then just click Compare to receive a results page.
At wireless.cnet.com, the CNET editors provide feature stories focused on
wireless use in practical applications. Overall, we visit this solid site often
before buying anything.
CNET, like many other sites, now supports RSS feeds. If you don’t know
about RSS, you will soon: Most news and information sites offer RSS feeds
to tell you what’s happening on their Web sites. An RSS feed is an electronic
feed that contains basic information about a particular item, like the headline,
posting date, and summary paragraph about each news item on the site.
You use a program called an RSS reader, such as NewsGator Online (www.
newsgator.com) or any of dozens of other free RSS readers, to reach out and
access these feeds regularly. You find RSS readers that load into your e-mail
program, browser, and instant messaging program, for example. All these
readers allow you to scan the headlines and click the ones you want to read.
You could set up an RSS reader to access the RSS feeds of each of these sites
in this chapter to stay current on everything wireless. We highly recommend
RSS. By the way, the Google of the RSS world is the Syndic8 (www.syndic8.
com) site. There, you can find a massive listing of user-submitted and
Syndic8-authenticated RSS feeds. Just enter your keyword in the Search area
and Syndic8 displays all the listings of available publications and sources
with that phrase in their descriptions. Check it out!