Library Systems - Post #3

For this entry, I decided to talk about RSS; though I guess we'll be talking about it in class on Thursday. I thought I would focus on two ways that RSS has already helped me a lot in this class.

First, it has made it a lot easier to keep track of everyone else's blog posts. When class first started, I would go to the "links to blogs" page on the wiki, then click on each individual blog, then see if they'd written anything recently. Then I thought "Duh, this is why RSS exists". Sure enough, Blogger automatically creates an RSS feed for each of our blogs. Using Bloglines (though most people use Google Reader, I guess), I've subscribed to all of our blogs. I even made a special folder to organize them and keep them separate from the other blogs I read. (If you want to subscribe to our blogs, just click on the orange RSS icon in the address bar (in Firefox), or click on the RSS icon next to the home icon (in IE 7).

The other way RSS has helped is in keeping track of changes made on the wiki. There's an RSS feed built into it that lets you keep track of all changes made to any of the pages. This will be more valuable as the semester goes on, and we start adding and changing more things. It's been very helpful in another class I'm taking, where we have to post articles for discussion. Once again, instead of checking a website to see if it's been updated, I can have the updates delivered to me!

Well, I hope I didn't give away Dr. Ball's RSS lecture. I just really wanted to share how RSS has made my classes much easier to handle!