Thing 8: RSS

CNN.com Newsroom Design Desk
Originally uploaded by kuzquiano

RSS - something else that I have managed to ignore up until now. And in attempting to sign up with Blogspot, I was ignored right back. For some reason, Blogspot would not send me the email that was required for me to sign up through them. So I moved on to my old friend, Yahoo!, where I already have an account.

Signup up for RSS feeds through Yahoo! was so easy that I could have even skipped the hand puppet RSS tutorial recommended through 23 Things (but I would have missed out on alot of fun). I quickly added a few sites, just to get the feel of what I will be gaining through adding RSS to my Yahoo! site. I will go back later and add some other sites that I frequently use.

I can quickly see that using RSS will be a great help to me with my job. I frequently visit various sites to see if the Library has been mentioned in the press. Being able to have information compiled on my Yahoo! site will cut down on that time, which is a great help to me.

I noticed though that I started thinking about sites that I LIKE to visit occassionally, and about how I could add them too. I think this is the hidden danger of RSS - having alot of sites together at one place can make for a distracting time.

I'm going to use RSS for awhile and I'll report back on whether the pros outweigh the cons. Or maybe you can just add my blog to the RSS feeds that you get...