The Hunt for RSS Feeds

My original goal to post weekly about my Project Play experience has already gone by the wayside since it is definately not Tuesday anymore. I feel like I've already broken one of the main objectives (or should I say directives? rules? does blogging have rules?) of blogging that we learned last week - that they are updated very regularly to keep relevant and current. What can I say - RSS threw me for a bit of a loop. And I already had a Bloglines account with many feeds that I set up long before this lesson!

I decided to begin with the account I had for the Adult Services Staff at my library. I worked on sorting out the feeds into different folders and arranging the folders. Did anyone else find it a bit clunky to work in "edit" mode? I had some problems when I had many folders open and wanted to move a feed from one folder at the top of my list to somewhere near the bottom. Eventually I figured out that I should close all the folders that I wasn't currently using to make organization go more smoothly (or, truly, to go at all!). I also had some initial confusion with changing the sorting from "manual" to "a-z". Really, what librarian is going to sort her feeds any old which way...bring on order I say! I finally figured out that you should click on the title of your folder, then change the sort option up at the top, then click on submit. But enough about sorting.

I then created a new account just for me and began adding feeds from those suggested at Project Play Week 3. I wonder if anyone else has noticed that some of the feed links can be difficult to find? For example, the feed from the New York Times Articles about Libraries and Librarians took me forever to find. (Hint - scroll almost to the end of the page and then scroll over to the right side...could this need to scroll to the right be due to how my browser window is set up?! I really don't know.)

Next I moved over here to my blog and decided to test out the differences between adding types of Page Elements like "Link List" or "Feed" in the Layout section of Blogger versus a Blogroll from Bloglines as HTML or JavaScript. Would these look and work the same? A resounding no. The Feed option allows you to add just one RSS feed to your blog at a time, with each one a unique "page element" while the Link List can include both websites and blogs and will display in a list format (doh, probably why they call it "link list"). I decided NOT to go with either of these options and instead just added two blogrolls instead - one of fun feeds and one of library related feeds.

Overall I think week 3 was very informative and I'm glad I had an incentive to more deeply explore RSS and readers. Now I just have to work on not feeling guilty about clicking the "mark all read" feature more often than I probably should.