Friday, November 2, 2007

Thing #8 Make life "really simple" with RSS and RSS feeders

Well, I made it through another "thing" in my life. Actually, I finished Thing #8 several days ago, but am just now getting back to posting about it. (After all, there are other "things" going on in my life. Ha!)

Anyway, I chose Bloglines. I can't tell you right now why I chose it over Google Reader. When I was looking at them several days, Bloglines grabbed me for some reason. I thought it was very easy to set up an account. Somehow when I started exploring to find various feeds to subscribe to, I looked in the left panel of my screen and noticed that there were hundreds of feeds already subscribed to. I'm not sure how that happened. I was going to try to unsubscribe, but found that I was having to go into each one separately. I knew I didn't have time for that, so I created another account.

I was successful in subscribing to most of the ones Mary suggested. I created folders for different subjects like libraries, news, health, "girl stuff", and sports. (I'm a big Cowboys and Mavericks fan.) Anyway, I tried to subscribe to various sections of the Dallas Morning News, but I think I did something wrong. I wasn't able to put each individual part of the newspaper into various folders that I created. I'm going to have to go back and delete all the individual ones and just subscribe to the whole newspaper I guess.

I like the fact that I won't have to visit individual web sites to check for updates . . .they will come to me. I won't have to "find" or "look" for information about things I am interested anymore, whether it's for my personal life or school-related information.

I can use this tool to subscribe to websites that will help me keep my staff informed of new things going on. If my students are doing research, I can subscribe to sites like Feedster.com. I can search for different topics that my students are researching and within less than a day have new items to choose from that might help my students. It's like having your own personal researcher. I could really go for that! And it's free! I don't have to put them on my payroll! Ha!

I haven't looked closely at creating bookmarklets yet, but what I saw of it, I think I'm going to investigate it more later, when I have time.I've made my page public, so click on this link to get to it:
My Bloglines

3 comments:

Debbie said...

I had bloglines and then created my Google reader. I agree with you. I really like the Bloglines account better. Have you seen the "sub with bloglines" feature? It's saved in your favorites and anytime you find a website you go to that and it subscribes you to that site.

Bookmaid said...

I had the same problem with adding the Morning News sections. I think what I did was find the section of the news I wanted by going to the website. Then I copied the URL for that section and pasted it into the box for adding feeds. I did this in Bloglines. I never could get it to work in Google Reader.
I put the sections in the folder for NEWS. But I noticed today that the sections do not appear separately in the folder, although the articles are separated when I click to read them. I had local news, latest news, and Mesquite news. I may try to add another section like sports and see what happens.

Midnight said...

I love your idea about having feeds concerning research topics sent directly to your reader. It would be great to have all that info "delivered" rather than having to find it.