RSS FEEDS
RSS Feeds = are great! (personal opinion). It doesn't really matter what the letters stand for (Really Simple Syndication) - what matters is what it does. What is it? Okay - you have to sign up for a feed reader or an aggregator (scary words) and then you go to your favorite websites and add them to your feed reader/aggregator and will then be automatically sent updates when new entries are posted (in a blog) or articles added.
This weeks activities:
- Watch this CNET explanation - it is fantastic.
- Sign up for bloglines. This is a free online news reader. I have signed up for this and now don't have to go to individual newspapers - the articles update automatically for the news I request. Yippee.
- Look at your favorite online news sources. See if they have RSS feeds for you to add (unforntunately some sites don't offer this fantastic service).
- Keep blogging. It doesn't have to be about RSS feeds (but can be). Just try to get used to using the web to inform others - about you or your library.
Zenaida : OK, I did not read this before I posted for Week 3. Anyway, not to bore you but I added a Flickr RSS feed to my blog. See http://zenaida.wordpress.com/ . I will perform a few other RSS experiments real soon. UPDATE: I added two RSS feeds to my blog, from BioMed Central http://www.biomedcentral.com/ and PLoS Biology http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=index-html&issn=1545-7885. Both of these feeds will display (on my blog) titles of the latest (daily) articles that are posted on their sites. (06/14/2007)
UPDATE #2: Take a look at http://wordpress.com/tag/toxicology/ . If it has not changed since I last looked, is an example of wordpress blog promotion. I must admit that there were not too many postings with the toxicology tag (um, I think 3 
). But, it is a start. However, if you look to the left and click on the technorati icon (http://technorati.com/tag/toxicology), you will see the blog (without authority, of course). Look soon, because it might be way down the list in a few hours. An example of a university Nursing School RRS feed provider: Johns Hopkins School of Nursing http://www.son.jhmi.edu/newsevents/RSS/. This is a link to an interesting article written by a Law Librarian (The Tao of Law Librarianship: Using RSS Feeds for New Book Titles - Calling All Publishers by Connie Crosby, published on February 12, 2007): http://www.llrx.com/columns/tao11.htm. Another interesting technorati link - http://technorati.com/posts/tag/toxicogenomic-technologies. (06/14/2007)
UPDATE #3:
(06/15/2007)
UPDATE #4:
- I had to remove the feed of Melissa's blog. The recent headlines show up fine, but the links are not working properly. I will deal with that later.
- I fixed the rss feed of Melissa's blog. Blogger (BlogSpot blogs) publishes its feeds in Atom 1.0 format. It appears that Wordpress is using RSS 2.0. (There are some differences.) I had to add this code at the end of the VeganBilbliotecaria site feed URL: ?alt=rss. See http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42662&query=rss&topic=&type=f .
(06/19/2007)
Alyssa: I started using Bloglines about 4 or so months ago and it's like crack for me. Maybe it's because I'm lazy and it actually reduces the number of clicks to get somewhere. I believe i have somewhere around 60 feeds coming to me daily. And to totally nerd out- I regularly search other blogs that are part of my daily reading to see if they've included an RSS feed yet.... Ok- the MAIN reason started this was to subscribe to job postings. I get updates from the Chronicle, Monster, Google Jobs, Yahoo HotJobs!, careerbuilder, Washington Post, IFLA, SLA, ALA, and a couple of other ones. I would ALSO like to mention that Bloglines allows for "email subscriptions" SO if the site doesn't yet have RSS, but you can subscribe to have it emailed to you daily, Bloglines will create an email address that you put in the website and it goes to your feeds page and NOT your personal inbox!!! I just love it. I'm always trying to get other people on the RSS bandwagon as well.
I also wanted to mention that Web2.0 really hit me in the face yesterday (Monday) after the final episode of The Sopranos aired on HBO. It seems to me that the entire internet was abuzz with reactions, comments, criticisms and accolades all in Web 2.0 formats, blogs, wikis, "conversations" on news sites and yes, I got about 15 different news stories in my bloglines about the show!
Melissa: How did you subscribe for an email? I couldn't figure it out. And Zenaida - what does adding a Flickr RSS feed to your blog do? I love RSS feeds but I don't think I am doing anything exciting with them - I am just getting updates on news stories that I then cull for the "good news" section of my blog
-Melissa- If you would like me to show you how to do the email subscription thing, I'd be happy to stop over by Mullen! and if you want to see my bloglines, I can show you that too! -Alyssa
-The Flickr RSS feed is not doing very much. It just provides blog access to 10 photographs that are in my Flickr folder. However, I can see how my other RSS feeds can be very useful. (1) I am providing visitors with additional information. (2) My blog will have a sense of currency, even if I do not post daily. There are book publishers, other libraries, etc. that provide RSS feed. I will post some examples soon. Zenaida
Kitty - I responded to Melissa in an email about this, but decided to share with everybody else. I subscribed to Bloglines a year or so ago and never remembered to go look at it. So...... when I did remember I'd have dozens of stories from each of the feeds. Which mostly meant I marked them as read rather than actually reading them. I didn't know about the email feeds option, but I get enough email already. What I've found recently is that a lot of the library-related blogs that I'm interested in (at least for a while) allow me to subscribe and put a button on my toolbar. (This may be a relatively new capability in RSS that didn't exist when CNET did their terrific little video) Any time I want a break and have a few minutes, I can scroll across the toolbar and see a list of recent posts. Easy to see if there's anything new. Of course most of these only post daily (or even less often) And there's no way of seeing whether comments have been added to a post I've already read. Still - it works for me. If I were smart, I'd go back to posts that really interested me and see if there were comments that were worth reading.
Jonathan - Live Bookmarks are a relatively new feature of web browsers - Firefox first introduced them in 2004 and Internet Explorer earlier this year, I believe. This is an example of RSS feeds being used by another piece of software. Convenient for quickly checking your feeds, however there is only so much space on the toolbar! A nice thing about aggregators is the ability to "save" in the of Bloglines or "star" in the case of Google Reader, posts for later. I've used Bloglines for a couple years now but I've recently started using Google Reader and I like it - real easy to use if you're used to Gmail. A few things I've learned from a few years of subscribing to feeds:
- Use folders or tags to organize your feeds into useful categories. We're librarians, we should be good at this!
- Scan the titles of posts for entries that look interesting... don't try to read everything!!!
- Periodically look over your feeds, if notice some that you haven't read for a long time delete it. If its not important enough to read once in six months, you probably don't need to keep it.
Anne: Setting up RSS feeds is really fun! However, I repeat what I said in Week #2, that it's the moving from one site to another and logging in and out and recalling what account and password to use where is really annoying; also, for me, the vocabulary is problematic, for example--the difference between "Publish now" and "Save" is unclear to me. Pity our poor patrons who need to know that "External Link Resolver" and "Find It" mean the same thing, and that "WRLC Center" means our remote storage site.
Anne Marie
I already have RSS feeds on my firefox toolbar so I was somewhat familiar with them. This exercise was interesting. It was easy to set up the blog and add RSS feeds. They had a wide assortment of blogs to choose from and took advantage of that but I didn't try to import an RSS feeds. I tried to set up my Myspace blog for RSS feeds but myspace read the code given to me by bloglines as html and I was not successful. I haven't explored recieving RSS feeds by email. Thanks for the tip about checking the blog frequently so we don't have to wade through tons of RSS feed articles later on and also the tip about setting up emails frpm to go to your blog. I like the convenience of RSS feeds and will most likely check my bloglines blog often. Alyssa I'm in mourning over the Sopranos series ending! It was crazy the way the Internet erupted with fans outraged by how the show ended. I thought it was a good way to end a show that would be impossible to tie up neatly. I also loved Tony's new cat! (big surprise).
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.