Subscribe Please

Now that the beginning of the semester workload is over, I actually have a minute to catch my breath. It seems like I have little time to post the goodies I find or the causes I think need to be supported with studying and home life at the head of the list of things to do and the items I rarely get past. So, today, I take a deep breath and get back to the blog. First, I have gone back to using FeedBurner to manage my RSS feeds. FeedBurner is nice because it handles a wide variety of feed readers and aggregators with ease. You (the reader) doesn't have to worry about RSS, XML, or Atom, but simply click and add it to your reader or aggregator of choice. FeedBurner will make sure that your software has the feed that it needs. It also give me the satisfaction of knowing that someone out there in cyberspace is actually reading the blog on a regular basis (ego-booster!). So, since most who read have little experience with feed readers and aggregators, here is a bit of a tutorial. Software Garden and Maricopa Community College have brief overviews about what RSS feeds are all about and an introduction to feed readers and aggregators. If you use the customized start pages for Yahoo and Google, you actually have a feed reader available to you by customizing the page. The important thing to remember is that thousands of web sites today use RSS feeds to inform their visitors of changes. By using a tool to check all of your favorite feeds in one click makes it easier for you to keep up-to-date. Here are some of the more popular ones (in no particular order - I use Google) that are web-based. My suggestion is to give them a try and see which one works best for you.

• My Yahoo!
• NewsGator Online
• Rojo
• Newsburst
• Google Customized Homepage
• Google Reader
• My AOL
• Netvibes
• Free Dictionary
• inclue!
• Bitty Browser
• Plusmo
• NewsAlloy

When you decide which one works best for you, come back to here and click the chicklet icon that corresponds to the service you chose under Subscribe and keep informed about what is going on here. By the way, those subscribe chicklets will probably move (will still be on this page) as I redesign the layout a bit today, too.