Bloglines contiues its work....

Bloglines is now owned by Merchant Circle, and Bloglines will continue to serve as an RSS reader. It has a slightly new look to it, mainly a "facelift" of sorts, and I like how it's organized. What can benefit all users is the "view" format - list, expanded, or mosaic. This feature certainly lends itself to different styles of viewing and organizing information.

The List shows one line of information - source, and the beginning of the summary or article. Benefit: easy at-a-glance format to select articles to read

Expanded shows more of the summary or beginning lines of article, as well as options for social communication
Benefit: decision is quick and easy to read article; plenty of "white" space

Mosaic is for those who are visual. I believe this is a new feature, and it looks great. While one would have to scroll a bit more to see options/items (depending upon how many feeds one has), the icons and/or images are a nice alternative to print.

Take a look at the "new" bloglines:
http://www.bloglines.com/

Using BlackBoard to host videos, rss feeds

Just sharing with colleagues that we do have capability through BlackBoard which has full capacity to create rss feeds and host videos.

Here is the podcast that Matt Stuczynski produces with his Spanish grammar class:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/NewTrierSpanishGrammcast

See Sharon Mooney's video podcast of her cat videos:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Carlandwallace

You can subscribe (via rss) to these public podcasts through iTunes, etc.

Vernon Hills High School has a library video channel hosting "movie trailers" for the Abe Lincoln nominees. Take a look.

Getting Started with RSS Feeds

You can actually create web pages using RSS (Real Simple Syndication) and watch your web page update automatically. Options for creating websites with RSS feeds include Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) and Pageflakes (www.pageflakes.com). With both of these free tools you can make a columned page as include as many of your RSS feeds as you want. This software allows you to drag and drop boxes of feeds for customizing the look of your web page.

Creating a feed into a regular web page made with Dreamweaver requires a javascript feed program such as Feed2JS. I mentioned this free service in an earlier posting.

More RSS Resources worth mentioning:

The RSS Compendium Resources List --listings of RSS directories, feeds, aggregators

RSSFeeds.com --finding feeds

RSS Feed Factory from the BBC --good explanation of RSS

The Weather via RSS --plug in your zipcode and post this feed on your webpage

Making RSS feeds

At Jenny Levine's ISLMA session on blogs, wikis and rss we learned about the usefulness of RSS.
(Real Simple Syndication). After learning more about RSS from The Shifted Librarian wiki page I practiced with RSS on the New Trier library blog and decided to find a way to add an RSS feed to the AP Jr. Theme BlackBoard site for NY Times editorials. Not sure if this is a possibility with our version of BlackBoard. However, I finally figured out how to add an RSS feed to the blog. If you scroll down and look to the left sidebar you will see a NY Times feed for editorials. The best site to use to generate the java script is Feed2JS. The tricky part is to find the correct spot to paste it into the html of the blog template.