Thing 4 - Explore RSS Feeds

Explore RSS Feeds

Once you become a fan of blogs you may want to know when they are updated with new posts. The old way was to subscribe to email. If you followed 23 blogs, that would mean that your inbox could quickly become flooded with emails. Fortunately RSS came along.  RSS stands for either “rich site summary” or “real simple syndication.” Either way, what matters is that RSS is a cool tool that can efficiently alert you when your favorite blog or news feed has been updated.  Want to know when your favorite columnist has written a new article? Just subscribe to her RSS feed.

What is an RSS feed? (From CT 23 Things)

Enjoy and learn from RSS in Plain English, a Commoncraft Show, on YouTube. If you can't see the Blogs in Plain English video, click here to watch it on the Common Craft website.

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What is a widget?

A widget is a symbol that contains html code that you can just click on to run a small program.     You’ll see them all over the internet, including web pages, blogs & wikis.

These are pictures of some common widgets:

After setting up an RSS account, you will subscribe to your favorite blogs and other sites that publish new content on a regular basis (like news headlines). You could subscribe to as many blogs as you like – even hundreds – but then, all you have to do is visit one site and be instantly updated on all that is new on all your favorite blogs. Just click the icon or the Add to my Google Reader icon and the blog or news feed will be added to your Google Reader account. These same icons represent widgets that bloggers will add to their blogs to allow their readers to follow changes to the blog on their RSS aggregators. Watch this video to learn more about how RSS works.

To complete Thing 4 you must:
A. Create a Google Reader account
B. Create folders in your Google Reader account
C. Reflect on Thing 4 on your blog

There are a variety of RSS services (aggregators). I personally use My Yahoo because I have been a Yahoo guy for many years. For our class we will use Google Reader to maintain our consistency with the use of Google applications (and to keep you from having to remember too many pesky passwords!) It's a useful aggregator because it stores your RSS account online so that you can access it from any computer. You can make a portion of your RSS account public so others can see which blogs and sites you read. When you watch the video that shows how to create folders in Google Reader, it will also give directions on how to share.

A. Create Your Google Reader Account

Watch the video to learn how to create your RSS account. Then go to Google Reader and get started.

B. Create Folders in Google Reader

Once your account is created, you will want to make some folders where you will keep your feeds. Watch this video to see how to create folders.

Create these four folders: (1) 23Things, (2) News, (3) Misc, (4) any topic of your choice - personal interest, subject area you teach, etc.

C. Reflect - Blog Prompts for Thing 4

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of blogs out there - how do you handle information overload and how do you think RSS might help with that?

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