Thing 30: RSS Feeds and Delicious

map by xkcd

This has been a Delicious time-waster! Actually, more of an RSS time-waster. One thing leads to another, and another.

It's dangerous to work around those RSS feeds! Because of course one wants to read them. They are, in fact, the very things one has decided are important to read and know!

So there's a little playing around with RSS feeds, a lot of reading of RSS feeds, a lot of drifting off to the blog links in RSS fed blogs, and my goodness, it's way past bedtime, and another day gone! Lost to a learning experience, just not the one planned.

A recent example: While working with FeedRinse, I read an interestsng post in The Shifted Librarian, which had a link to a great cartoon map on online communities. I decided to follow "xkcd," the artist, and stumbled around for awhile trying to find on opml file or RSS feed. No joy. Instead, s/he is part of LiveJournal, which I had to join. So I joined with my newly coined open id, which took a little while because they didn't want the ID, they wanted the URL, and I had to remember which blog, email, or community was my OpenID provider, and said url. I chased a few wrong turns, but found it, and now it is bookmarked on Delicious.

I'm now a pround member of LiveJournal, with one friend, Mr/s. xkcd. I will have to see if I can RSS feed liveJournal output into one of my proliferating readers (you know I had to try a couple!) because I will NEVER remember to check LiveJournal.

That being said, I love the RSS feed aggregators, rinses, and channels. PageRank is my favorite so far, but I'm monkeying around with pulling the washed feeds from PageRank into Bloglines.

This is completely worth the time its taken. I was so overwhelmed by the sheer number of posts on The Shifted Librarian, Librarian in Black, LifeHacker, Wired (in aggregate, and some individually) that I simply marked them as read so that the "# unread" didn't torment me. It will be far better to read a few "great" and "best" posts than to lose them all.

I like John Welsh's suggestion to subscribe to the Google "Shared Items" of industry leaders. O also found the "More Things"-recommended article "Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Feeds" useful.