A little over a year ago at the VLA Conference in Williamsburg I attended a session where one of the speakers first introduced me to RSS. I let the information percolate in my brain for about a month before opening up a Bloglines account. Using the search feature in Bloglines I discovered different websites of interest that offered RSS and I started subscribing. Ten became twenty and the more I read the more I found sites that could be subscribed to. Librarian blogs, writer blogs, news and sports feeds: anything that I might check out by surfing the web could be conveniently kept in one place. My web of interest could be condensed into one site and I would no longer have to bookmark a site in order to find it again.
Fast forward to now and a few things have changed. I now use Google Reader. Two reasons for that. First I found that Bloglines was making mistakes and marking some items as read when I had not read them. Annoying but I've heard that the new version has taken care of that problem. Second is the ability to integrate Google Reader into my Google homepage. Rather than having to log into my Reader account I can place a smaller version on my Google homepage and read articles right off of the screen. Here's a screenshot of my homepage: (Notice Google Reader on the left hand side)Click to enlarge.
Keeping one internet window open (my homepage) I can scan through any articles available by subscription through my Google Reader. Have I lost you? No worries, send me an email and I can help. Or jump right in and explore: it is all free and you can't hurt anything. If you get frustrated, leave it for now and right a spicy blog post about the ridiculousness of this exercise.
If you do get the hang of it you might find that the internet becomes a little more personalized and easier to access. Its been a little less than a year since I first experimented with RSS and now I couldn't imagine navigating the web without it.
I am not going to share my complete blogroll here and instead offer you recent articles I have shared through Google Reader. They can be found to the right under "Articles of Interest". Enjoy!
4 comments:
Hi! I was looking over some of the blogs being created and had to tell you how beautiful your's is! I love the pictures - thank you for sharing them! I hope all is well with you and Georgiana (and baby!) We still miss you but are very happy to have such a great relative of yours!
Thanks for the warm words Diane! Yes I do have fun with the old camera and its nice to have another venue to share them. I have some previous experience with blogs and welcomed the challenge of making this one look good.
I didn't know you were an Afghani accountant.
Bryan, I can't give away all of my identifying information. I figure this is as good of a cover as anything else. Also I'm trying to broaden my horizons.
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