Brain Food

I have had very little experience with RSS feeds before today. I receive an RSS feed from Apple, keeping me updated on their newest technology, or giving me new tips on how to make the most of my Mac. (Yes, I love my Mac!) I receive this feed into a separate mailbox in my email. I also subscribed to the feed from Community Development Web 2.0 via Firefox at the beginning of this course. The Firefox feed doesn't give me the nice little blubs like Bloglines & my email feeds do, but I was able to see when there was a new post, and I was able to navigate directly to said post.

I found Bloglines easy to subscribe to, as well as easy to add various feeds to. I liked that the search tool has a "Top 1000" listing, as I often find it difficult to figure out what sorts of things I would be interested in reading about. One thing I did find strange about Bloglines, was that once I added something from the Top 1000, I couldn't find a simple way (other than using the back button on the browser) to get back to the search page. This I found frustrating. It's also annoying that after adding the weather feed to my library, it displays in imperial measurements, rather than the metric it did when I previewed it.

I believe I prefer to add feeds from my own favourite websites via their RSS fees link. I found the RSS link for the Globe and Mail at the very bottom of the site, and from there I was able to select which specific feeds I wanted. I also used the Top 1000 on the Bloglines search to add a "Word of the Day" feed. I was unable to access Feedster, and I found Topix to be far too cluttered to be helpful. I also like to have them either delivered to my mail program, or on my browser. I realize that Bloglines is a portable RSS reader, but as I am not a frequent traveller, having these feeds at home is fine with me.

Wouldn't it be great if we could create an RSS feed of new acquisitions? I'm sure many patrons would appreciate that, but then the holds lists might get that much longer...