Really Simple Stuff (If You Know What You’re Doing)

I found this lesson less than edifying. Sure there’s websites that are all about feeds so that you don’t have to search for feeds, but how do you navigate them? Where are the Help options? Where’s the gentle tutorial for using RSS directories and databases in this lesson? Ironically, setting up a Reader account was easier and had loads of instructions, but using these RSS search tools is more frustrating and we get no help or tutorials!

I checked out all the search tools in the discovery exercise and was most unimpressed with them. Feedster—the largest collection of RSS feeds—is down for construction. TopixNet had tons of topic and forums, but no easy way to get the facts and details instead of everyone’s opinion on a particular topic. Syndic8 can pull up lots of results, but all you learn is the different state for the feeds, from Desiring Syndication to Dead. I can’t say Technorati was particularly exciting and the tutorial wasn’t particularly informative or inspiring.

I found Bloglines and Google Reader’s feed finders more to my liking. They found me websites with information instead of blogs about my search topic and they didn’t leave me feeling overwhelmed with the technicality of RSS feeds like the search tools in the exercise.

While doing this exercise, I kept asking myself this: Why do I want blogs about news instead of the news itself? I think I’ll stick to finding RSS feeds myself instead of using these feeder directories, thank you very much.

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.