Are you using InfoQ? I found InfoQ to be a great source of information long before I started to write for them. During this time I’ve discovered some tips and tricks on the site.

As a user of the InfoQ website you can either just browse news or you can take advantage of some of the more advanced features the site has to offer.

Disclaimer: This information is based on my personal usage of the InfoQ.com website. There might be more functionality available (and probably is) or I might be wrong about some functionality I’ve covered here.

Website functionality

Not functionality per say, but in the top left corner you see how many visitors InfoQ has on a monthly basis. Here showing almost 400.000 visitors for March 2009, which I think is pretty good!

On the left hand side there is a list of all the communities that InfoQ writes about. Un-checking communities let you filter out stuff you’re not interested in. Clicking on any community you will see all content from that community.

Based on your community selections above you can get a personalized RSS feed, that of course gets updated whenever there are new content on InfoQ.

On the right hand side of the site, there is a box with tabs showing Articles, Presentations, Interviews and Books and one tab showing All.

This is a great source of info which I learned to appreciate quite late. Today I use it very often, especially to find recent presentations and interviews.

Note: All content you see here will also be announced as news items.

InfoQ publish content in four different languages: English, Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese.

In the top right corner of the news section there is a button for contributing news. Use this for suggesting tings you want InfoQ to cover or maybe you have an interesting article that you want InfoQ to consider publishing?

Other options

If you are a registered logged on user, you can go to Preferences and check the box for the InfoQ Newsletter. This will give you a summary of the content for the past week. If you don’t have time to monitor the website on a regular basis, this is a nice option for many.

InfoQ also have it’s own bookshelf written by several different authors, many of them being editors for InfoQ. Books currently available for free online reading (print version at a small cost):

• Scrum and XP from the Trenches
• Starting Struts 2
• Agile Patterns: The Technical Cluster
• Mr. Neighborly’s Humble Little Ruby Book
• Getting Started with Grails
• Domain Driven Design Quickly
• Scrum Checklists
• Enterprise SOA Adoption Practices
• Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks
• Java Transaction Design Strategies

URLs

Community
By adding the name of the community behind the infoq.com URL you get a page displaying featured content, news, articles, interviews, presentations and books about that particular community. For e.g. NET you would use http://www.infoq.com/dotnet.

Topics
By clicking on a topic, e.g. you get a box like this:

It’s quite self explanatory, but the Exclude might need some extra explanation. On InfoQ you can exclude topics you don’t want to show up on the website. So let’s say I want to follow what’s going on in the .NET queue, but I don’t want to see anything about Windows Forms, I can do that by selecting a topic as showed on the left or go the Preferences and add that topic to my exclude list.

Tags
Tags work much in the same way as Topics, except they’re tags and not topics

Twitter

InfoQ is also present on Twitter. You can follow at http://twitter.com/infoq or just add @infoq to your Twitter client.

Planet InfoQ - Opinions and Perspectives from InfoQ Editor’s Personal Blogs

The title kind of says it all Check out http://planet.infoq.com. Here you’ll also find Tweets from all the editors on Twitter.