Feed Me!

I can't believe that it took me so long to get on board with RSS. It is silly, really.

I am a champion web surfer and I visit a lot of blogs; that was especially so when I was writing one of my own. I seem to recall that I tried one or two times to set up a feed, but something didn't work and I wasn't that desperate to have one, so I moved on.

I am so glad that I had no choice this time.

So I set up accounts with Google Reader and Bloglines. I am probably go with Google Reader because I like to stay with one team as much as possible: I already have used Chrome, the Google browser, for a long time, I am a big fan of Google Wave, and I have always used them for searches, so why not keep everything in the same place?

I don't know if it is because I read our textbook first or that I had something on the "to-do" list, but it was very easy to set up the reader in both Bloglines and Google Reader. I had a bit of a struggle with Bloglines because I couldn't figure out how to make it so that there were only headlines in my inbox instead of digests like I have it set in Reader. I still couldn't find that function even after searching help. I am sure it must be there and I am just missing it. Anyway, set-up was fairly easy.

I can see now what I was missing all of this time. I am really big into photography and my bookmarks are littered with things I wanted to remember, but now I feel I can clear up some of that clutter as long as I have a feed to that particular site. So I found some photography sites and added some of my favorite news sites and technology site. It was very simple and I am not done yet.

For the classroom, the benefit will be obvious. Imagine when students are working on a topical essay and they get a daily dose of the newest news and opinion right to one place for their viewing pleasure. I think they should be excited about that.

The technology standard on research and information fluency can be reached and practiced much easier with an RSS feed. There is definitely a great advantage to using an RSS feed. I am glad I finally did it.