Here We Are. What Now?

1. Go to Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/), and then click on the thing that says “Sign Up Now, It’s Free.”
2. Once you’re at your Feed page, drag and drop the URL onto your Bookmark Toolbar, either by itself or into your folder of pages you open every day.
3. Get a “Sub With Bloglines” button for your Browser.
   • When you first go to your Bloglines account, there will be “help” style information in the central section of the page. Look down on the list under “Subscribe To It.” Just follow the directions, and you’ll have a new button for your browser in no time!
4. Get more Feeds.
   • When you are on a site that has an RSS feed, you can click “Sub With Bloglines,” and add that feed to your Bloglines list.
   • In Firefox, any site with an RSS feed has an icon in the address bar that looks like a square with three radiating lines coming out of one corner.
   • In Firefox or IE, pages that have RSS feeds often advertise that fact with various icons that say “RSS” on them.
   • Sometimes when you click “Sub With Bloglines,” you will get a list of several different feeds. Just choose one of these feeds – if it’s not obvious which one, look for the feed that has the most subscribers.

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More Feed Stuff

1. You can add feeds to your Bloglines if you know the URL of that RSS feed. Back on the Bloglines page, above your list of feeds, there are three short headings: Add, Edit, and Options. Click on Add, and you can add by URL, or conduct searches by category. Try “Quick Pick Subscriptions” for a list of popular blogs. Edit will allow you to delete feeds that you don’t want any more, and Options lets you customize how you want your feeds to be displayed to you.
2. Other places you can search for RSS feeds: (thanks to KCLS 27 Things (http://kcls27things.blogspot.com/2007/03/8-find-some-feeds.html) for this nice list!)
   • Topix.net (http://www.topix.net/) is a search tool that allows you to locate recent newsfeed items based upon keyword or phrase searching. The tool focuses specifically on news and media outlets’ RSS feeds, not weblogs.
   • Syndic8.com (http://www.syndic8.com/) is an open directory of RSS feeds that contains thousands of RSS feeds that users have submitted.
   • Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/). This one is limited to blogs, but it can help you find blogs that might be of interest to you.
   • Also, if you want to keep up with Library related blogs, there are two wikis out there that list Library related blogs. They are: LISWiki – Weblogs (http://liswiki.org/wiki/Weblogs) and

The Blogging Libraries Wiki (http://www.blogwithoutalibrary.net/links/index.php?title=Welcome_to_the_Blogging_Libraries_Wiki).

(When you get to the section of this tutorial on wikis, remember these two – if you’re planning on keeping up your blog and talking about library related stuff, you could add your blog to the list!)

Things To Do

1. Blog about your experiences! List which RSS feeds you subscribed to, with a sentence or two about your favorite ones.
2. Add the RSS search tools to a folder on your Firefox browser.
3. Add your favorite RSS search tool to your Blogroll.