Feeding the Feed

I think purposely looking for feeds can be overwhelming. Yes there is tons of stuff out there you can subscribe to but you can over do it. The better way is to be aware that feeds exist and when you come across something useful in your everyday pursuits you check to see if there is a feed available. That way you limit your feeds to the ones that are actually useful to you. They are handy if you want to be able to group and quickly skim work-related blogs for relevant information. But you can also get sucked into a black hole of trivia.
Syndic8 looks boring but utilitarian. The random suggestions on the main page are interesting, though, as are the top fives. I'm not sure I approve of them posting who has just registered, however. Privacy issues. Except some are obviously fake names. Hey! The Woodburn Public Library Teen Reads is one of the five most viewed feeds. Who would have thought? What is that library doing right to promore their RSS feed? Clicking on the link for that feed in Syndic8 takes you to a statistics page that has a preview and various options to grab the feed. In fact there are other links to all sorts of other mysterious technical statistics that are fairly unintelligible to most people. Who is it that reads this stuff? Yes, Syndic8 gets my vote for the most geeky of the feed finder sites. I added a science fiction podcast blog to my Bloglines. I also found a bunch of links when I did a search of children's books. Guess which library turned up again. Overall, I didn't have much luck searching most of my subjects. Browsing worked better.

THING 8--RSS: Been There, Done that.

I use Firefox so have been adding feeds to my browser for over a year now. I find it easy to do and very handy. Now IE has that feature, too, and I've tried it out.

Also, over a year ago I created a Bloglines account but didn't use it much and now have forgotten my password. I can see the usefulness of having a web site with my feeds, though. It means I only have to set them up once and then I can access them on any computer--if I remember my password.

I think my mistake the first time was populating Bloglines with stuff that wasn't that crucial to me--so, let me give it a go again.

LATER:
I thought the Wicki article was too teckky but the Commoncraft video, RSS in Plain English was an excellent introduction to the concept. I thought the Palinet tutorial was pretty good, too. The CNet video wouldn't finish loading for me.

EVEN LATER:
Okay, Bloglines is all set up for me and some feeds added in three different ways so far. And why would I want to do all that search for the RSS icon and copy the link or cut and paste URLs when I can just drag the Sub button to my toolbar and sub with two clicks? When not at one of my very own computers, I suppose, but I'll take the easy way every time.

The advantage of Bloglines is that you can see the posts in the preview pane, whereas if you get a feed to your browser you only see the names of the posts in your drop down menu and have to click one at a time to view.