Saturday, January 30, 2010

Thing #9 Feed Searching--the times, they are a' changin'!

One thing I found very interesting about this Thing is how quickly technology changes. Several of the links to RSS feed search engines were either not valid any longer or were out of date. Feedster doesn't even exist any longer; I found a link to a November 2007 blog that was titled "Feedster Quietly Dies." The largest collection of feeds no longer!

Topix.net no longer focuses specifically on news and media outlets; blogs are included in the default search screen, but you can limit your search to "no blogs" or "just blogs" in addition to both news and blogs.

I found Syndic8 too bare bones for me to be able to use it easily, and Technorati too cluttered. Plus, Technorati is mainly used for blog searching, so I found it difficult to find RSS feeds. I suppose it would be good if I wanted a feed for a particular blog. Also, apparently Technorati is in a Beta stage and has changed its system around in the past year, so I'm sure the tutorial on finding and adding your blog to Technorati must also be out of date.

In summary, I found the RSS feed search engine in Bloglines to be the easiest to use, and once I found a feed I wanted to add, it was very simple to subscribe right there in my Bloglines account. I added the Merlin "Highlighted This Month" feature to my Bloglines account, in addition to New York Times articles about libraries and librarians. Did you know some libraries are asking patrons to donate food instead of paying library fines?

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Thing 8: RSS feeds

Whoo, boy! I can't believe I haven't been able to work on this training project since August. Ah, well, better late than never. I have certainly heard of RSS feeds before, but never really understood how they work. I have registered at Blogline, and have a small list of feeds I am now subscribed to, including Library Journal News and Helene Blower's blog.

I can certainly see the appeal of having a feed reader that aggregates all your favorite blogs into one place. At home, I have sites I visit every day, and have them bookmarked on my computer. This is so old school! I will now have to just bookmark Bloglines, and go there for all my blog fixes. : )

In addition to some library feeds, I have added one for my favorite web comic, Girl Genius, by Phil and Kaja Foglio, and a feed to the "Talkin' Trash" blog from Montgomery County's Division of Solid Waste Services. This blog is very useful to find answers to questions about what we can and cannot recycle in the county.

I tried to add a link to the blogroll, but was not successful. Will have to play around with it later!