Really Simple—Sure!

Up to this point, this lesson was where my progress came to a screeching halt. It wasn’t really that I found the tasks difficult; it was simply daunting looking at all the explanation, tutorial lessons, and the discovery exercises (some optional, no less!) that I could do. And the warning that this was the most difficult Thing had me putting it off to do another day. And another. Repeat.

When I finally created the RSS reader, the setup was easy enough surprisingly. Certainly simpler than what the copious volumes of Discovery materials led me to believe.
I had created a Google account for the blogging exercise, and imagine my delight when I found that I could set up an RSS reader through the same account. I started adding all the RSS feeds that were recommended in Thing 9, and that was when I ran into some trouble. The most important RSS feed—the one for L2 Chronicles wasn’t working! I was crushed.

I asked around and eventually learned that I could just copy the URL and paste it into my Subscription section. I wanted to add the Ask VBPL andRA Gourmet, too, but I couldn’t find any RSS feeds. However, after the little tip, I copied the URLs and now have one place to go see all the updates from Ask VBPL, RA Gourmet and L2 Chronicles!

Fired up with the success of a Reader, I went ahead and created a Bloglines account for my personal use. Really, the easiest part about RSS readers is setting up the account. The difficulty arises with having too much features that are available, figuring out what they do and how to use them and them struggling to keep from getting overwhelmed with all the available tools.

I was quite curious to see how different the Google Reader and Bloglines were, since I heard contradicting opinions about one being easier than the other. Buoyed by the ease of creating a Reader and finding feeds, I set off to gather the RSS feeds from websites I like to frequent.

Alas, I found to my dismay that most of the websites I wanted to subscribe to had no RSS feeds. These websites usually sent newsletters directly to your inbox after you subscribe your e-mail address to their mailing lists. Oh well, I guess some websites haven’t caught on about including feeds for their new contents.