blogger ate my homework

OK, so I just wrote a long post about RSS and Blogger became 'unavailable' when I came to publish the post, and now it's gone and can't be retrieved. Lesson 1 - I don't know... copy and paste into Word while working? Very very annoying.

First off the blocks today - Bloglines, like Blogger, was blocked on the Learn.nets (and now is not, thanks Michael!). While I was waiting for it to slip through WebMarshal's sticky net, I worked through a couple of the tutorials listed on the course blog. Palinet was a very useful, simple and basic introduction, though I found the wait for transitions between slides was slightly annoying. The 'Using Bloglines tutorial' was great. It started with the basics, with plenty of screenshots, and then blossomed out into an exploration of some of the ways you can use the site.

I really like the idea of RSS. I'm a spotty user of the internet, as it is; I read a couple of web comics, spend a bit of time browsing galleries and art sites, watch batches of movie trailers and read reviews... all 'when I remember'. The idea of something that collects the stuff I find fun and inspiring into one place, and serves as a gentle reminder to see what's new out there, is very cool. The challenge is, I guess, not to be flooded with stuff as a result, because there's so. Much. STUFF.

Also, of course, there are things we can and should be doing as a library service, with RSS. We've got the lovely new New Books pages which could be drip-feeding into people's newsfeeders, and Kelly's suggested we could have a News and Events feed so that people get notified whenever there's a new event posted. Definitely something to explore in the future.

Re Bloglines itself: I found it pretty easy to set up, and adding feeds is easy so far. One thing I want to investigate is how to change the options for a single feed, rather than all feeds; for example, in Options, it says I can choose a level of detail for single feeds, but I can't see very clearly where to do that. Something to explore.

I was interested to see a library-related feed in the Top 50 list, so I've added that and will give it a whirl.