Welcome

Welcome to the 2nd RSS feed knowledge session.

City West Library Team

Notes from RSS for dummies session

What is RSS?

• Heard of RSS?
• Seen small funny tags on websites?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a file format for delivering regularly updated information over the web.

To gather information you may visit lots of websites everyday and you have to trawl through advertising, image heavy pages to find the information you are after.

Webpages that have RSS allow you to gather the feeds in one place, so you only have to look in that one place (in an aggregator or feed reader) and then you can access the information of a number of webpages in one place, at the same time, without advertising and only showing you information that you haven't seen before.

Many pages already have RSS feeds, sometimes these are depicted with a little orange rectangle with RSS or XML written on it or it can just be a link.

Aggregators or Feed Readers?

Aggregators or Feed Readers allow you to gather RSS feeds in one spot. You decide which feeds you want and subscribe to them in an aggregator or feed reader.

Some aggregators are webbased such as Bloglines, Feedexa and Google Reader. Some readers are a program which you download onto your computer like Feedreader or the reader comes with a browser. Web Browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Safari already have this feature.

Here is what Bloglines looks like:


You can find feeds when you are surfing the web by looking out for the little symbols and logos. Or by doing a search in some of the feed search tools.

Feed search tools:
Feedster
Syndic8
CompleteRSS
Google Blogsearch

Look on websites for RSS, XML or ATOM icons, for example:
Ebscohost
ABC

Feeds are now being used for all sorts of information distribution such as:

• news
• library notices, new books
• search alerts - via databases
• podcasts - audio segments
• vlods - video segments
• blogs - online journals

Some interesting blogs:

• Blog about Libraries
  
• City West Library Blog - this one!
  

Hi bloggers
I am determinded to master this technology! Did any of you see the list of wikis and blogs that Irene sent through the other day. They were Library related of couse but some look interesting. If you didnt I will send you the link. I am looking at one on communcating with staff! When would you use a wiki rather than a blog? Does anyone know
Anthea

RSS feed now available

Hi there all,

Ok ok I'm home, on holidays and I'm posting work stuff but I'm a little excited about City West staff having their own blog. Thanks to Nic for being the first person to post something, and it was very profound indeed.

As you will recall I had trouble finding the RSS feed for our blog. Well it appears that I had to add it to the links to the right of this blog --->

I've also added a link to Bloglines should you wish to join them (free). If you recall this is a free aggregator (or feed reader). There are others out there and also ones that you can download to your computer or as part of a browser like Firefox.

I will post the notes to of my session after I get back from holidays as it is currently located on my H drive.

If you are keen to get started, please join Bloglines and ask Nic should you need some help.

See you in a while,
Brigitte

nic

err..ummm..dunno what to say...hmmm..I'll come back when I think of something

Welcome

Welcome to the City West Library Blog. This blog was created to teach staff about blogging, rss feeds and other new technologies that can aid information searching and delivery.

Through this blog, those that are interested, can keep on learning and sharing their ideas. We may even discover new ways of using this Blog.

This blog can be used by all City West Library Staff as a shared space.

After today's starting sessions on RSS, Blogs, Vlog, Podcasting for dummies, I hope all staff will contribute to this blog.

I will also be posting notes on today's session on this blog.

Let the fun begin...

Brigitte