RSS and Personalised Homepages

Week 2 has covered RSS and personalised homepages.  I covered this last year so see http://karenaitken.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/week-3-rss/ for my previous comments.

I really liked using Google Reader for my RSS feeds.  I use it nearly every day.  As the feeds are via my Google account, I can access them anywhere so I have set up both work feeds and leisure feeds.  I can also set it to check webpages that don’t provide RSS feeds automatically.

Personalised homepages were also briefly covered last year see http://karenaitken.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/week-6-online-applications-and-tools/ and my opinion on them hasn’t changed.  I never used the personalised page that I set up over the last year.  At work, I have 3 tabs set as my homepage and I prefer this to a personalised homepage.  Also, I can quickly access frequently used websites via shortcut icons on my toolbar.

Week 3 – RSS

Week 3 has covered RSS (Really Simple Syndication).  Topics included RSS aggregators/readers, RSS feeds and how to find RSS feeds.

I currently have a desktop based RSS Reader which was set up so I could check the website updates were working correctly.  However, as it is tied to my desktop, I haven’t really used it.  However, with the flexibility offered by the web-based RSS readers I became more interested in trying it out.

We were offered two readers – Bloglines or Google Reader.  I opted for Google Reader after reading an article which compared the two.  (http://lifehacker.com/software/google-reader/geek-to-live–from-bloglines-to-google-reader-205786.php).

I found Google Reader easy to use and started to set up some feeds suggested in the Web 2.0 course.  I quickly discovered that some of the suggested links were filling up my reader so deleted them (the news feeds).  I think for any content that is as fast changing as that, I will just visit the website.  For those websites that don’t change so frequently, say every two days or longer, it is more efficient for me to find out via the RSS reader when new content has become available.

I will keep on adding more feeds to my reader as I come across suitable websites as I do prefer going to one place for all my information (and have it come to me) and I am going to transfer my table of contents alerts to the RSS reader instead of my email.