See, the title of my post is "Feed me Seymour" and my last name, before I was married, was Seymour...and this post is about "feeds"....see, its sort of funny and witty, right? OK - EJ (my husband) would certainly groan at my pitiful attempt at humor. Maybe I should just stick with the task at hand.
So, this exercise continued to explore RSS feeds and several tools out there to help you find and add feeds that you want. The directions suggested trying out the Bloglines search tool, but since I had already used that in Thing #8, I decided to move along to the next suggested tool, Topix.net. After exploring Topix.net, I've decided that I like the the overall look and layout of this site. I also like the fact that they quickly provide you will some big picture news feeds like Phoenix news, US News, and World News. They even have a special Election 2008 section that you can subscribe to. My only complaint with Topix.net is that it is not very obvious that these are feeds. I didn't see an RSS, XML, or Subscribe Here button anywhere on their site. I decided that I would like to subscribe to their Offbeat News feed but it took me a while looking for a feed icon of some sort before I finally decided to try just copying and pasting the site's URL into Bloglines. This worked but I think for someone unfamiliar with feeds, Topix.net doesn't do a very good job of explaining what they are and how they work. I do look forward to checking in on my Offbeat News feed though....
I next moved on to Syndic8.com. Honestly, as soon as the page loaded I was turned off. The layout is so terrible that I didn't even want to experiment with this site. In the interest of learning (this is Learning 2.0 after all) I decided to try a quick search for "English Bulldogs" to see what kind of feeds came up. I had tried this same search on Topix.net, but most of the results were related to sports teams with a bulldog mascot so I didn't both adding this search to my list of feeds. I was pleasantly surprised when Syndic8.com returned 2 feeds that both seemed related to news and information about bulldogs! Unfortunately I wasn't able to add either of them to my Bloglines account. I'm not sure why this was a problem but I will try Syndic8.com again from on a public PC in hopes that I will have more success next time.
Finally, I moved on to Technorati.com. Since Technorati is a source for finding blogs, I decided to look for more Teen Fiction blogs that I could follow. As I mentioned in a previous post, the Goddess of YA Literature and Book Obsession blogs are two that I have been following for some time. They are both a great tool for helping me to stay on top of what is coming out in Teen Fiction. I found several blogs to choose from by doing a search for "Teen Fiction". I decided to add Teen Fiction Cafe to my list of feeds. The great part is that if I don't like this blog that much, I can go back to Technorati.com and find a better one. It looks like a pretty good one though.....
So, after completing Things #8 and #9, my Bloglines account shows 14 feeds. If I can successfully add the two bulldog feeds that I located on Syndic8.com, I'll have 16 feeds! I'm not sure how I'll ever keep up but at least I know I'll always have something interesting to look at online!
