Week 4: RSS and news readers

RSS feed readers (also known as aggregators) provide an easy way of keeping up to date with your favourite sites and blogs. The CommonCraft team have produced this 3 min 43 sec long clip explaining how it all works.




RSS readers
There are many reader sites such as Google Reader and Bloglines, freely available on the internet. They require you to sign up for an account but it is free and accessible anywhere in the world. Browsers, such as Firefox and Internet Explorer, have RSS feed subscription facilities built in, as does Microsoft Outlook but these are tied to a specific computer.

Setting up an account
For this week's tasks you'll need an account at a feed reader site. We suggest you use either Google Reader or Bloglines. In the case of Google Reader if you have a gmail account you can just sign in using exactly the same log-in details, and your account will be ready to go. On the other hand, if you want to go with Bloglines here's how to set yourself up:

• Go to the Bloglines site and click on "Register with Bloglines".
• Fill in your email address and create a password. This is your Bloglines log-in.
• Check your email for a confirmation email from Bloglines
• Follow the instructions provided and you are ready to go.

How do I add feeds/subscriptions?
Have a look at this information from the "help" section of Google Reader to see how to add feeds. Alternately you can choose to use Bloglines as your feed reader. Here is a one minute video showing you how.




Where can I find things to subscribe to?
There are a number of different ways to find things to subscribe to, for instance Google Blog search which limits your results to blog posts. You can search for new feeds directly from your feed reader too. Bloglines has a search tab on the main screen, and in Google Reader you can click the "add subscription" button then search by keyword. Many sites have a "subscribe" link and some, like the New Zealand Herald site, give you the option of subscribing to specific sections such as Entertainment, Politics and National news. Flickr also has feeds so you can subscribe to someone's photo updates. An example of this can be seen on the Ning where Jaime has provided the subscription link for the construction pics.

Thing 8: Setup your own Bloglines or Google Reader account.

Thing 9: Locate and subscribe to some blogs, including our participant blogs (listed ont he right hand sidebar of this blog). Tell us how it went in your blog post

Fun and games: if you have time

• Subscribe to some feeds for sites you frequently visit.
• Organise your feeds.
• Use the search function on your feed reader to find new sites to follow.
• If may find some interesting blogs to follow in the 50 top librarian blogs.
• Share a post with someone - either by emailing it to them or through other methods of sharing.