Thing 4: RSS

Wow, these are very informative readings and now that I understand what RSS is I can hardly wait to start using it. I disliked the old subscription "feeds" all going to my email and clogging it up, interspersed with real email and spam. Just by reading I can see I will use RSS. I will have one RSS aggregater per subject (unless further reading and practice show me a way to subdivide better than my home email sending things to separate folders). That way when looking for a specific topic update, I can go directly to my specific reader for that topic. Yeah!!!!!

I could not get the YouTube RSS video to play (perhaps it was the slowness of my wireless link), so I will go back to that on another computer. Until then, I am going to start setting up my first RSS Aggregater!!!! more later.......

I got signed up with Google Reader and it automatically brought in the blogs I am following with this blog for 23 things. In doing so, my home reader page has a left sidebar that lists my folders and a right window (large) that shows the entries I have subscribed to. Very similar to my email set up. I'm going with it for now.

I subscribed to several new feeds using the feed search tool provided and organized the subscriptions into 3 separate folders: 23 Things(for the 8 blogs I follow automatically downloaded), Computer Tech (for my 2 C-Net feeds about tech news and tech reviews), and Library Feeds (for the several Library related news and blogs subscriptions). I will continue to play with my settings in hopes of setting it up so the list of subscriptions is larger maybe with icons that I can click on to open another window with only the selections within that folder for perusal. Hopefully I'll find something. I just don't like opening to a large junky window of information and perusing a smaller pane for navigating......

I did find a really cool feature, though: Google Reader has some topical feed bundled together so that you can subscribe to several in a topic all at once. Topics actually included Dr. Who!! (But not Star Trek, can you imagine.) There is a Geneology bundle, a Vegan bundle, lots of interesting topical bundles. if you haven't looked at this featrue check it out....

Although truthfully I will not be subscribing by bundle; being a road less traveled type of person I like making my own choices instead of taking the easy, already prepared way. I will, however, look at each individual feed winthin the topical bundles that interest me to see which if any of those feeds I might like to add.....I just want to know what I'm signing up for and want to be able to opt out of some of their choices