8th Challenge

Challenge: Learn about RSS feeds and set up a Bloglines account.

RSS Feeds....Really simple syndication.

I had some difficulty setting everything up. I hope it gets really simple from here on out.

The discovery resources provided by the Virtual Services team were extremely helpful. It did make it seem very easy.

However while trying to set up the Bloglines account, some of the screens are now very different than the screen shots in the "Using Bloglines Tutorial". Hmmm....perhaps Bloglines made some updates? It made following the directions more of a mystery.

The subscribe page on Bloglines is now missing the text entry boxes for Blogger, LiveJournal, and Xanga. There's only one text box now....which ought to seem simpler, but it sometimes rejected blog addresses that had the orange RSS box showing at the bottom of the Mozilla Firefox window. I had to fiddle with some of the addresses by removing the "http://" and could get some to work.

I found that I also wanted to rename some of the feeds, but had trouble with this, too. One of the feeds that I added has an address in html, rather than just a name. Another feed that I added has "++++" as the title, only because the feed has that text in as decoration for the layout on the blog page. I finally figured out how to change the name. Good, now everything looks much better.

The "Share" tab for Bloglines that was shown on the Learning 2.0 screenshot to find the public url was now listed as an "Additional Feature" in a different location.

After much trial and error, I have the public url and managed to make it a live link:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/Matchadragon


Now that all is in place, I think I'll be able to enjoy what RSS feeds are all about........tomorrow.

Whew!