Posts Tagged ‘RSS’

Did you know that Mail, the default e-mail client in Mac OS X, now supports RSS feeds? It’s been in there for about a year, actually. I don’t use it myself because I already had an RSS client I really like, but if you’ve yet to get into RSS and need a gateway, this is worth a look (especially if you’re already using Mail for your e-mail).

Apple has a nice, brief tutorial video on how to use RSS in Mail. Unfortunately, they’ve disabled embedding their video clips from YouTube, so you’ll have to click to view this video tutorial. Totally worth it, though.

Now that you know how to use RSS in Apple Mail, don’t forget to subscribe to this blog! feeds.stratepedia.org has other feeds that may be of interest.

Getting behind on reading our blog? We try to make it as easy as possible to keep up. Here are a few options:

• By e-mail: Visit our subscriptions page on FeedBurner to receive a digest of whatever we’ve posted daily.
• By RSS: Add our feed to your favorite RSS reader.
• By Twitter: Sign into your Twitter account (or create one) and follow @stratepedia to get automated links to new posts in this blog and other occasional updates.

As you no doubt know by now, we’re big fans of RSS. We’ve covered RSS extensively in the past, referring you to articles and tutorials that can help you get started with this very handy technology. If you’re still holding out, you might want to give Seth Godin’s blog post about RSS a gander. It’s not so much about the how, but more of the why. My favorite part:

And if you’re not a subscriber (to this blog and others) today is a great day to start. RSS is a little like radio. Every blog and many news services ‘broadcast’ a tiny little signal that you can’t hear, but your RSS reader can. (It’s like a radio tuner). You tell the RSS reader which blogs and news feeds you like, and whenever it senses that signal, it goes out and grabs the post for you. Quick and free. With a good reader, you can easily keep up with 100 blogs in less than an hour.

Ready to get started? We’ve written a few articles about how to get started, and pointed to other articles as well. If you’re in CRL, just stop by our offices and we’ll help you get set up. And maybe, if there’s interest, we might conduct a webinar on the topic for the SIM Network–what do you think?

After a long week of getting Coaching Calendar up and running for the Virginia CLC schools, I’m taking a brief break and catching up on other projects today. First up: I’ve added the following feeds to feeds.stratepedia.org, our one-stop-shop for CRL and SIM-related RSS feeds. For those of you who haven’t latched onto an RSS reader yet, this is the next best thing.

New feeds:

• CRL Learns
• Stratepedia on Twitter (which I’m planning to start using more)
• For Your SIMformation (Sue Woodruff’s new blog)

This morning Aaron introduced me to Simply Headlines. This website gathers most of your favorite information and arranges it in a newspaper format. It works a lot like an RSS reader (Confused? Try this first), only this time it is rolled up in a rubber band and tossed directly into your inbox. Yup, all of your favorite sites are emailed to you once a day and you don’t even have to tip the paperboy.

Simply Headlines consists of four easy steps:

1. Provide your name and email address (the one that you will use to receive your daily news).

2. Personalize your content.

• Decide what time you want your “newspaper” delivered to your inbox.
• Pick a format. HTML will show pictures while the Text format will only show text.
• Choose which types of news you like to read.

3. Select which websites you would prefer to get your news from. (Simply Headlines will guide you through this process as well.)

4. A confirmation email will be sent to the email address you provided. So go check your email, click the Simply Headlines link to confirm, and you are finished!

Now all you have to do is grab a cup of coffee and wait for your daily newspaper to be delivered. Its almost as good as sitting on your front porch in your bathrobe.

So, you read Amber’s excellent introduction to RSS technology and would love to use it, but for whatever reason you and Google Reader aren’t clicking? That’s OK, I’m the same way. Luckily for us, Google Reader isn’t your only choice when it comes to RSS readers.

Lifehacker, and excellent blog about technology literacy (add it to your RSS feeds!) today has a write up on its readers’ choices for “best” RSS readers. Google Reader ranked at the top, but the article also shares a few other options, including NetNewsWire, a Mac-only reader that’s my personal favorite. So if you like the idea of RSS but are looking for an alternative to Google Reader, check out the article, try some of the options, and let us know what your favorite is via a comment below.

No, I’m not making this up: Today, May 1, is RSS Awareness Day. What better time to hop on over to Amber’s tutorial on RSS to learn more about this technology and how it will make you a more informed web reader (and may give you back a few extra minutes you would have otherwise spent hopping from site to site).

Introduction

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Instead of searching in several different places for new information, the RSS reader does the searching for you and gathers the information in one place. By doing this, RSS feeds can help you save a ton of time. Oh yeah, and RSS feeds are also easy to use…if you can check your email, then you can use RSS. Keep on reading and find out just how simple it really is!

How it works

I really like how this video, posted on CommonCraft.com, explains the workings of RSS.

We’re big fans of RSS technology around here, and evangelize it whenever possible. (No idea what I’m talking about? Check out Amber’s RSS in About an Hour mini-course in the Stratepedia Learning Labs.) That said, I know there are a lot of people who haven’t gotten around to checking out RSS readers or finding feeds for their favorite sites, or you may just not know that a handful of CRL-related sites with RSS feeds are out there. So, as a little exercise, I created an easy, one-page view of these feeds’ headlines at feeds.stratepedia.org. Add it to your bookmarks and open it up whenever you’re wondering what’s going on at CRL!

Do you know of some feeds I missed? Leave them in the comments below. Adding Jim Knight’s blog to this list is a to-do item for me; for some reason I can’t get the RSS from it to show up properly. Are there others? Are there things at kucrl.org or stratepedia.org you’d like us to make RSS-friendly?

Check out feeds.stratepedia.org

At some point Friday evening I’ll be adding the following new features to Depot:

• RSS feeds for all groups: Get updates via RSS whenever your favorite groups get new content. (Hint: If your group also has a presence in the Learning Labs you can integrate the RSS feed via a block–ask me or Amber how.)
• The return of ratings: The little-used but potentially useful ratings mechanism from the old Content Enhancement Library has been moved to Depot. You can now rate resources on a 1-5 scale. If you’ve ever used Netflix you should know how this works.

This will be it for a little while on the rapid-fire updates–after this I’m moving forward on adding capacity for indexing by state standards. This is a bit of an undertaking, but is actually doable now that we’ve moved to Depot.