RSS Feeds

March 23: This is exercise 8. Last week I went ahead and began reading about the RSS feeds and I watched the Cnet video. Just now I looked over the Palinet Tutorial two times, just to be sure I was following all the terms correctly. I though the tutorial was very good and I found the information and screen shots very helpful for an introduction. We will see what happens when I actually try to go into blogline and subscribe to feeds.
I just read the next tutorial (Betterdays, Using Bloglines Tutorials) and found it a little more difficult to follow, I went back through it a few times. I set up my bloglines account and began scanning different feeds, before I decided to subscribe to the Onion. It appears to have worked. Enough for today, I am on vacation on Monday and will get back to this Tuesday.

Tuesday, march 27.
I tried to subscribe to one of the Mercury News Feeds, just by copying the URL, and it did not work. I thought one of the tutorials had said not to worry about URL's with html language that begin XML, but when I went to look at it in Bloglines there was nothing there for that feed. My coworker came in at that point and told me she had done it just by pasting the name in (she also told me the listing from the Mercury looked different than when she used it, but that is what we tried and it worked.) So now I have two RSS feeds on my Bloglines.

I find what I am doing now is rushing through these exercises and feeling stressed, but not really absorbing the information. I will continue to read through the information in the exercises, but obviously I am not going to finish by March 30. I am only here today and tomorrow and have a lot of other things to do. So I will continue to go through this tutorial on my own time, (assuming that it will remain accessible,) and I think I will get more out of it that way.

Later I will go back and look at some of the other RSS feeds that are out there. Maybe I will look at Syndic8 that the tutorial mentioned. I can see how they can be valuable and I know some of the online databases have a similar function. But for now I am going to skip ahead and go the section on Wiki's.