Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Week Four-ish

Since I'm on the krl2pt0 committee, some of this stuff I did weeks ago, and my experience is not going to be typical. But here's what I think so far.

Week One: Not much to say about signing up for gmail, pretty straightforward.

Week Two: I wrote the Blogging module (with Bob's help), and I've had a personal blog for, gosh, five years now. I found some fidgety things about Blogger, not so much setting up an account as trying to access the account once it was out there. I meant what I said about naming the thing. I started out with "my two cents," taken. "My three cents," "my four cents," I think I got all the way up to six or seven cents before I gave up. I happened to be rereading Sense & Sensibility for the umpteenth time, so that clicked. And here we are.

Week Three: I've used del.icio.us on the Ref Desk, and as part of the krl2pt0 team, and tagging can be addictive. Remember, you don't want "blog," "blogs," and "blogging" as tags. (Or "book," "books," and "recommended books.") Make your tags meaningful and use them wisely, but know that you can always refine them later.

And now Week Four: RSS is less familiar to me. Here are some tips on using Bloglines, since "Add subscriptions to at least two of your favorite krl bloggers" is a little vague. YMMV (your mileage may vary), but what worked for me was to do it this way:

1. Once you've subscribed to bloglines (pretty easy in itself), plug in a couple keywords that go with your favorite krl blog. (How to decide? There are so many cool ones out there!) Put, for instance, "engaged endangered" into the box next to search for posts.
2. Wait a moment, and then you'll see it on the righthand side, under Matching Feeds. Don't click on the link! Instead click on "View all matching feeds."
3. Then you can click on "Subscribe to feed." It's pretty straightforward from there.

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