Week 4 RSS Feeds and Bloglines and Challenge

Today I have set up my Bloglines account. I have chosen 13 feeds so far and am still working on adding a few more. Maurice, you cannot hide, I have you in my Bloglines now!

What shall I say about Bloglines. It is not hard to work with these. I hope I find time to actually look at some of the feeds I have chosen. It makes me wonder when everyone else does this? Do you look at these at home, at work, when you are out on the reference desks? I can see how it saves time to have your interests under one roof so to speak, but even so it's still possible to get carried away browsing these.

I also looked at the tutorials for RSS and Wikis by Common Craft on You Tube. I thought they were very helpful and clear.

Important note: Challenge!!! If you are in Week 4 #8 of the 23 Things, scroll down until you see the Discovery items. "3. Create a post in your blog about this exercise. Optional: If you're up to the challenge, you can provide the URL address to your public bloglines account." The item on the page tells you to click on the Share Tab in Bloglines. When you do this you will find the Public URL. You copy the Public URL from your Bloglines site, into your Participants Blog, so that other users can share see your feeds. What is not mentioned anywhere is how to get a USERNAME to add to the end of the Public URL. You need to go into the Blog tab on Bloglines and set up a blog there in order to get a username. Without this you cannot use the Public URL to share your Feeds. I was very confused by this whole section and Annette, through messing around and trial and error, finally figured out about the Blog username. You need never use the actual blog again, as long as you have the username. Note: To share your feeds, when you fill in the required information on the blog page, make sure you mark everything Public (not Private) or no one else will be able to see your feeds.

I don't know whether any of the people who already finished this section actually did this discovery activity. If you did and also had these problems let me know.

Anyway if you want to see what Feeds I have so far, check out this URL. I intend to add more feeds as time permits.

http://www.bloglines.com/public/JuliaM