Monday, September 20, 2010

Thing #3 - RSS

So, Thing #3 of the University of Westminster's 23 Things project is RSS feeds.

I already use RSS feeds to subscribe to blogs, but mostly of the craft/interior design/random persuasion [a big shout out here for the wonderful Home Shopping Spy and Tales of a Junkaholic who cheer up rainy lunchtimes for me]. Although I have several archives blogs bookmarked I can't say I look at them all too frequently, unless prompted by a tweet or suchlike. The one I look at most frequently is Archivalia, as this kills two educational birds with one stone, what with it being in German. I usually end up looking at this on a Tuesday afternoon in preparation for my evening class, and it's always interesting to get a wider European perspective on the profession, even if I only understand 40% of it.

However I've alwasy subscribed to blogs just by putting them in the toolbar of Firefox as this seemed the most obvious way to remind me to look at them. The idea of going to a separate feeder for them seems slightly unnecessary, and at first glance just another example of google dominance. I've learnt from Ellie Murphy's blog that I can organise my feeds into folders on Google reader, which certainly seems appealing - I have folders and sub-folder and sub-sub-folders to organise my internet bookmarks because I'm THAT sad, (plus I've been carting them round with me from computer to computer for about 5 years so most of them probably aren't live anymore), so I shall just say that the Jury's still out. For now I've used Google reader to subscribe to all the archives-related blogs I don't normally look at to see if it encourages me to actually read them. I'll update this blog next week, before embarking on Thing #4, and let you know if it actually works.