The Ultimate Guide
By Michael Lund
The Ultimate Guide started out as a simple plan to help me keep up to date with breaking news.
At the time I was producing a two-hour live weekday radio show for the ABC in Brisbane. The show was pretty fast paced and was supposed to give people a snap-shot of the day's events.
The Ultimate Guide website.
One of the difficulties was keeping up with the latest news. With so many news organisations running their own news services that meant a lot of websites to keep an eye on, and it was easy to miss something.
The rise of the RSS news feeds offered the potential to help solve that problem.
This was a developing online technology that allowed news organisations to deliver a simple feed of their headlines and intro paragraph on stories across a range of subjects.
There are several ways to access these news feeds but most require either some web based subscription, or some dedicated news reader software.
None of these technologies seemed to work all that well when shifting across several desks and computer terminals.
I'd already taught myself some web design - including the use of HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and some PHP - when I discovered it was possible to set up a dedicated website that would allow me to make use of the various news feeds.
The biggest challenge was to get permission to use the news feeds on a public website.
Some news organisations are happy for anyone to use their news feeds in any way (so long as it's legal), some demand restrictions to limit the use, some allow only non-profit use, some only personal use and some don't want you to publish their news feeds at all.
It took almost a year to sift through the various terms and conditions, and to negotiate permission to use the news feeds that you find today available on the Ultimate Guide website.
I also sought permission to use various other features on the website including daily fuel price information, international exchange rates, search engines for Google, the Weather Zone, Internet Movie Database and of course Wikipedia.
There are other search tools available including access to many Australian legal and court documents and transcripts, a check on Internet domain name registrations and a dictionary (American only).
Add to that a clock that's written in English and tells you the time as you would say it, then you have the perfect tool to help you keep track of time, and be informaed on the latest breaking and developing news.
Together with Ann, my wife and a fellow journalist, we are trying to grow the site to make it a useful and free tool for all journalists in Australia, and yes we do it for no profit. We absorb all the costs for the hosting and the time it takes to grow and develop the site.
Why do we do it? Because we believe journalism is a proud and honourable profession and if we can do anything to help us and our colleagues get better access to the wealth of information that's available on the Internet, then we are doing our bit to help that profession.
Please make use of the Ultimate Guide at www.ultimateguide.com.au and tell us what you think.
