RSS Feeds - Thing 30

Another of the "things" I learned about during "23 Things" that I use every day is RSS feeds. I subscribe to quite a few that range from Web 2.0 stuff, recipes and geocaching, to name a few. I have also deleted some that, after a while, I found not to be of interest to me. I quickly got over the guilt of deleting unread RSS feeds. If I don't check my RSS for a couple of days, hundreds of feeds await my attention. Although I might miss some valuable information, I freely "mark all as read", if time does not permit perusing all of them.

In doing this "thing," I added a local weather feed via rssWeather and a favorite Craigslist search for currently listed Lake Superior agates via Feed My Search. FYI: My search term for the Craigslist search I cannot reveal due to the fact that I am sworn to secrecy by my husband!

I really like the Feed My Search app. I will probably add more favorite searches to my RSS feed reader using this tool.

P.S. Do you remember the Flickr mashups from 23 Things? I used the Spell with Flickr mashup for the image in this post.

Google News - Thing 29

I use many Google tools on a daily basis, but Google News was not one of them. I usually just check CNN and WCCO for my daily news. When I went to Google News, it was a little confusing at first. After I discovered the "personalize" option, I rearranged the news categories, deleted "Sports", added my zip code to get local news and created specialized searches for geocaching, letterboxing, treasure hunt, minerals and fossils. I was amazed at the recent activity in all of those searches!

For student use, I think this would be a better option than Google Alerts because it is an immediate resource. I'm not sure it replaces our databases, but is something that would be available anytime and anywhere.

Google Alert - Thing 29

I have had a Google Alert set up for "SZSRocks", which is my user name for many web-sites, for quite a while. Thankfully, this alert has not provided any unpleasant surprises! Just to refresh my memory on how to set up alerts, I created one for the "Minnesota Mineral Club", an organization Steve and I are members of.

As for usefulness for the ERHS Media Center, students and/or teachers could use it for a specific topic search, but given the short amount of time for most research projects, I'm not sure if a Google alert would be the most efficient. Perhaps a Social Studies teacher could do an alert for a current world event and get daily updates.

P.S. I created the Google Alert! image at the top in Microsoft Word, using Word Art. In order to add this image to my blog, I needed to convert it to a jpeg. To do this, I selected the Google Alert! text box and copied it. I then opened Microsoft Paint under "Programs", then "Accessories" and then "Paint". I pasted the image into Paint. I sized the image and then did a "Save As" jpeg image. It worked really well. This opens up more image possibilities! Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Twitter

Steve and I worked outside all day today and it was really cold and snowy. Because of this, I wimped out and didn't go to the Minnesota Mineral Club meeting tonight, opting instead to stay home, keep warm and read my latest book, "The Genesis Code" by John Case. I went on-line to check e-mail, and got a little side-tracked after reading a blog I'm following in my RSS feed. It talked about Twitter and so, I decided to sign up. I e-mailed a couple of friends to join me. I guess I'm a little confused. I thought I was going to be able to search Twitter for people who have common interests and then follow their tweets. I have not figured out how to search for people via their interests. I'm not sure I have time to keep following everyone until I find someone who posts something that interests me. Does that make sense? If you have any pointers for me, please leave me a comment. Here's a link to my Twitter profile: SZSRocks Twitter Profile

Happy RSS Awareness Day!

Who knew? Thanks to one of my RSS feeds, I found out that May 1st is RSS Awareness Day. Here is a link to the site that is promoting the day: RSSday. The "Common Craft" video explaining RSS feeds is on this site. I think RSS is a useful Web 2.0 tool and want to help spread the word. Happy RSS Awareness Day!

Thing 3 - RSS Feeds

My boss (23 Things blogger, Runaway Train) found and showed me a neat web-site this morning. The web-site is http://alltop.com This web-site has a bunch of RSS feeds already set up for the user and categorizes the feeds by subject. I am going to add it to my favorite links on my blog, but your could also bookmark it in your browser. We just thought it was a nice site and wanted to share it with our fellow "23 Thing'rs"!

Thing 3 - RSS Feed Success!

I have been checking my RSS feeds on iGoogle for a couple of days now. I can see that you probably don't want to get too many, since it could get overwhelming. Anyway, one of my RSS feeds is from Rachael Ray's web-site. I get new recipe feeds. I actually made one of these new recipes for dinner last night. The hubby liked it and said I should make this again. Success! Now I just need to keep thinking how best to use this information at school. I plan on reading other CMLE blogs today to see what ideas my fellow 23 Things bloggers have. Stay warm and Go Elks! (MN State Girls Hockey tourney)

Thing 3 - RSS Feeds

I have just finished setting up some RSS Feeds in Google Reader. I chose Google Reader because I had already set up a Google account. I have done all of this at home, so am curious if it will show up when I go to Google at school. I added other 23 Things blogs, book search/review, local libraries, recipes and a few others that interest me. I found linking to the RSS Feeds in Google Reader was really easy. If I was on a web-site and wanted to add it to my Google Reader, I wasn't as successful, but I'll keep trying as those sites come to my attention. Personally, I love to try new recipes and adding Cooking Light and Rachael Ray RSS Feeds will give me recipes to choose from. At school, we can show students how to add our library blog to their MySpace or Google pages for current information. Teachers could use this for on-line assignments. I'll have to think a bit more about how to best utilize RSS feeds. I have to get ready to Jazzercise so probably won't get any more done today. I hope everyone had a happy President's Day!