Hi everybody,
I am getting more and more expert in blogging! This week I have learnt how to register for an aggregator, i.e. Bloglines, and subscribe to RSS feeds (see e-tivity 4)! WOW! Am I a prodigy of skill or not??? Not at all, it is simply a matter of patience and boldness!
Since I cannot attend the lab lessons and, in my life, never had I heard words like ‘aggregator’ or ‘feed’, I felt terribly demoralized when I saw the task of e-tivity 4 for the first time! My first thought was: “ I’ll never be able to do such things alone! What a mess this e-tivity! Things are getting too tricky!”, but soon after I said to myself: “Come on, Elena! Have a go! If you don’t try, you won’t succeed!” At first I had some difficulties of course, but thanks to some help from my group mates and the videos Sarah kindly put on our course blog I finally managed! Cheers!
To tell the truth, now that I’ve fulfilled the task I must say that Bloglines is one easy and extremely helpful tool:
- to subscribe to RSS, XML RSD, or XML feeds;
- to know very quickly and at one stroke if the blogs or websites of your interest have been updated with new posts and to read them immediately;
- to create a playlist where your feeds can be sorted out according to the topic they deal with (ex.: travelling, animals, music, sports, literature, friends, etc.);
- to go directly with one click on the title to a blog/site to read a new post and comment it.
It is out of doubt that I didn’t even believe that such tools could exist, or rather that they were freeware and so user-friendly…Before I would use more traditional methods to check if a blog or a website had been updated or not: in Internet Explorer I saved the URL under ‘Preferiti’, whereas in my personal blog under ‘Blogroll’ and went through all of them one by one every time…What a waste of time now that I know about Bloglines!
And you, either as a blogger or as a regular Net user looking for the latest news from the world, do you think that aggregators are useful tools or do you still prefer traditional approaches? If so, why?
Bye,
Elena
I am getting more and more expert in blogging! This week I have learnt how to register for an aggregator, i.e. Bloglines, and subscribe to RSS feeds (see e-tivity 4)! WOW! Am I a prodigy of skill or not??? Not at all, it is simply a matter of patience and boldness!
Since I cannot attend the lab lessons and, in my life, never had I heard words like ‘aggregator’ or ‘feed’, I felt terribly demoralized when I saw the task of e-tivity 4 for the first time! My first thought was: “ I’ll never be able to do such things alone! What a mess this e-tivity! Things are getting too tricky!”, but soon after I said to myself: “Come on, Elena! Have a go! If you don’t try, you won’t succeed!” At first I had some difficulties of course, but thanks to some help from my group mates and the videos Sarah kindly put on our course blog I finally managed! Cheers!
To tell the truth, now that I’ve fulfilled the task I must say that Bloglines is one easy and extremely helpful tool:
- to subscribe to RSS, XML RSD, or XML feeds;
- to know very quickly and at one stroke if the blogs or websites of your interest have been updated with new posts and to read them immediately;
- to create a playlist where your feeds can be sorted out according to the topic they deal with (ex.: travelling, animals, music, sports, literature, friends, etc.);
- to go directly with one click on the title to a blog/site to read a new post and comment it.
It is out of doubt that I didn’t even believe that such tools could exist, or rather that they were freeware and so user-friendly…Before I would use more traditional methods to check if a blog or a website had been updated or not: in Internet Explorer I saved the URL under ‘Preferiti’, whereas in my personal blog under ‘Blogroll’ and went through all of them one by one every time…What a waste of time now that I know about Bloglines!
And you, either as a blogger or as a regular Net user looking for the latest news from the world, do you think that aggregators are useful tools or do you still prefer traditional approaches? If so, why?
Bye,
Elena
PS: I hope that Sarah will post videos any time she explains new technologies; they are vital for students who cannot attend!Thanks very much for your help, Sarah ;-)
