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Staying Ahead of Bookmarks with RSS

March 16, 2007

Now that you have learned how to use Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking tool, to save and return to cool new websites that you (or other people!) find, the next challenge is staying ahead of all your new favorites. One great way to stay ahead of all this information is to use RSS to have the information delivered right to you.

RSS, which stands for something so geeky that even geeks can't remember what it is supposed to mean, is a tool that allows you to subscribe to a site's feed. What that means is that anytime new information is published to that website, it will automatically be collected and sent to you. The RSS feed won't bug you unless there is new information, which helps you avoid overload. Even better, you access your RSS feeds through an RSS reader, which means you only have to go to a single site for all of your updates!

Many different types of websites use RSS: blogs, podcasts, news sites, photo sharing sites...SLJ has a number of RSS feeds you can choose from as well. In this post, though, we are talking about feeds that come from social bookmarking sites - in particular, Del.icio.us. By subscribing to a feed from Del.icio.us, you will automatically receive any new bookmarks that are added by a user or with a tag. There are four easy steps that will get you up and running with RSS.

First, you need an RSS reader. My reader of choice is Google Reader. If you are just getting started with RSS, however, you may want to just add a feed to a "start page" like your My Yahoo! page or your customized Google page. Or, if you are just practicing today, you can get a custom page to try out at PageFlakes without any registration! [These start pages are very powerful! More to come on this topic!]

After you have a reader, you need an RSS feed. In the case of Del.icio.us, you can find an RSS button at the bottom of every bookmark page that will allow you to subscribe to receive updates made to that page. To subscribe in your reader, you will need to right click on the RSS button and then copy the link. For example, you could copy the link for the RSS feed on the bottom of the page for the "schoollibrary" tag at http://del.icio.us/tag/schoollibrary.

Then, you need to open up your RSS reader of choice and add the feed. Most readers and start pages have a button to "add a feed" or "subscribe to a feed" that you should be able to find easily. If you are trying this out on PageFlakes, you will need to click on the "Add Feed" button in the upper right corner and then paste the RSS link into the "Add Your Own" box. Click on the "Get Feed" button and then "Add to my page."

Now the last step is to use the RSS feed! Every time a new bookmark is added to Del.icio.us that is described with a tag as being about "schoollibrary" it will automatically show up on your RSS feed. If your feed is being displayed on a custom page like PageFlakes, this will provide you with a constantly updating list of new sites to explore on a topic.

Okay, so why is this important? Stay tuned to find out on Monday!

To subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog to receive updates whenever a new post is added, copy the following link and add it to your RSS reader of choice:  http://feeds.feedburner.com/DigitalReshift.

Posted by Chris Harris on March 16, 2007 | Comments (0)