News written by Petteri Pyyny (February, 2008)

AfterDawn.com is one of those websites that has been multilingual right from the very beginning of the site. Since when our site was launched back in 1999, there has always been two editions available -- one in English and one in Finnish. Now, a third language edition is finally available -- Swedish version of AfterDawn.com went "live" today.

The Swedish edition is rather limited for now -- we decided to focus our translation efforts on handful of site areas first and see whether there's enough interest to extend the localized offering to news and guides. So, the "mini AfterDawn" available in Swedish now consists software downloads, product comparison engine and discussion forums.

Swedish AfterDawn is still very strongly in its "beta" phase and is bound to have translation errors, missing translations and even some bugs. Thus, if you're interested to help and speak Swedish fluently, please submit all bug reports and translation corrections to us.

I'd like to thank all of our users who have participated to the translation project -- Helmer, okse and many others have contributed enormous amount of their time and dedication to the project. Lets hope our Swedish users (we have almost 10,000 Swedish members on our English site) "find" the site.

As the U.S. analog TV cut-off date is approaching, the public interest to government-sponsored coupon program is growing. But as our forum users have noticed and we noticed when we did some research into this subject, there's virtually no information available on the DTV converter boxes and their specs. Seriously, some of the products listed on official U.S. Digital TV are so difficult to find that it requires quite a feat to even prove that they exist.

To ease the process of comparing the converters that the coupons can be used for, we searched through the Web and compiled a full list of coupon-eligible converter boxes with all the tech specs we could find. Although the specs are mandated by the government guidelines, products still differ from each other -- some of the DTV boxes don't have EPG, etc.

Furthermore, we hope that as the cut-off date approaches and demand for the converters builds up, that our users would post their reviews to our DTV converter section, so that there would be a comprehensive list of reviews by real users (rather than lab tests published by newspapers).

For years, one of the most popular ways to follow our news has been through our RSS feed. The RSS feed hasn't been improved in years and in today's terms, the old RSS 1.0 without any associated styles or features, was a little bit tired to be honest.

Today our RSS news feed has moved to a new address and has an improved look and features. Most importantly, the feed now contains the complete news stories with pictures. The old way of having only a "teaser text" available for the RSS subscribers is gone.

To make the transition as smooth as possible, the old feed URL simply redirects to the new feed, so you shouldn't need to change anything in your favorite feed reader application.

If you haven't subscribed to our RSS feed yet, please do so -- our RSS news feed is available here:

http://feeds.afterdawn.com/afterdawn

If you are looking for a good, free RSS / Atom reader, take a look at Feedreader. It's very easy to use and quite versatile. If you are new to RSS feeds, please take a look at our RSS feeds guide/tutorial for more information on how to use RSS feeds with, for example, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Google Reader.