Thing #6: RSS Feeds

RSS, like Flickr, is yet another thing that a bunch of friends, plus my mom, have been blithely using for years, while I doggedly plod along manually (or manually-digitally) checking each individual site that I like whenever I get around to it. I have to admit that I like the idea of "visiting" different sites, rather than having them all streamed directly to me. While intellectually I understand the usefulness and efficiency of feeds, on a totally irrational level it feels more friendly and sociable to click over to the actual websites.

(NB: It feel pretty strange to have an "old-fashioned" way of visiting blogs already, when five or six years ago I didn't even know what one was!)

Anyway, this afternoon I finally got myself registered for both Bloglines and Google Reader, with some degree of success. Maybe because most of the sites I like to visit are blogs, I found Bloglines easier to use--Google Reader couldn't find a feed for one of my favorite kidlit blogs, A Fuse #8 Production, even when I pasted the URL right into the "subscribe" bar, while Bloglines turned it up right away.

Here is a link to my public subscriptions on Bloglines. I'm actually kind of a blog-reading addict, and have a much longer list of kidlit blogs that I check at least occasionally, but I'm starting out on Bloglines with just a few. Maybe I'll add to the list later, after see how this newfangled way of checking blogs suits me.