In Lesson #1 we learned about blogs. Hopefully, all of you were successful at setting up a blog, making a test post and comment, and finding a few new blogs to read. But isn’t it a pain to have to keep checking those blogs to see if there have been updates? In this lesson, we’ll learn about RSS and how it can make keeping up with blogs (and other things) much easier.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. This video from Common Craft explains what RSS is and why it’s useful:
To use RSS, you will need an RSS reader. There are many options for this, but personally I like using a web-based reader such as Google Reader or Bloglines. If you already set up your Blogger account, you have a Google account and can use that for Google Reader.
This video from Google Reader explains how to get started with Google Reader, and how to subscribe to blogs and other RSS feeds:
Google provides several other help videos as well.
Discovery Exercises
#1 Set up your RSS reader using Google Reader, Bloglines, or any other reader you may be familiar with.
#2 Try to subscribe to some feeds. Hint: Subscribing to this blog will let you see whenever something new is posted for Community 2.0.
#3 Post a reflection on your blog about your experience with RSS. How did setting up your reader go? Were you able to subscribe to feeds? Did you discover anything new and exciting, or was it frustrating?
As always, if you have any questions, leave a comment here or drop me an email. We will also be discussing this lesson on Sunday, June 14th, at 9:15 am during the weekly Tech Talk.
Note: I decided to start with one lesson per week for the first few weeks of the course, since blogs and RSS are major components of this project. I will shift to posting two lessons per week in upcoming weeks.
I think I’ll have to hear you talk about this in person.
Ellen, if you get a chance would you pls email me and remind me how people can find my blog?