RSS

RSS = Real Simple Syndication

It's actually really funny how we have come to a full circle. The Google Reader bundle that Aaron created for our class is actually an RSS feed! I've subscribed to one and didn't even know it. In fact, I thought that an RSS feeder was more like these:

I always thought that RSS feeds are these blocks that you embed into your blog to capture conversations about your blog/topic. In fact, I was quite stumped at how to put one onto my library website so that I could have my twitter feed there so people can read what I tweet. I once asked my athletic director because he has one on his blog and I was super jealous. He never told me how. He just said it was easy. Argh!!! And then it got busy and I got sidetracked and forgot.

I'm quite glad for this opportunity to attempt this once again. However, I realized that an RSS feed isn't exactly that. Sort of but not really.The RSS in Plain English YouTube explained to me what it was and I now understand! It's just a method of gathering websites or blogs that I like into one place so that I get updates whenever they update so that I don't waste my time re-visiting blogs wondering if they updated or not. Google Reader is great for this since it also has an app for my phone that alerts me when there's an update

So, as a next step, I learned how to add an RSS feeder subscription option onto this blog so that people can add me to their RSS feed. I embedded an RSS feed from the Daring Librarian's blog so that her updates will be shown on my blog. I even tried to add a twitter feed to this blog because I wanted to see if I could do it. I ended up with a bird that says follow me and it opens up a link to my twitter page.

I went back to the drawing board and decided to to YouTube it and try again but the video I watched was out of date. So I decided to type in twitter widget into the search bar in Twitter and found it!

For those of you who want to have a Twitter Feed like mine, this is how you do it once you log into Twitter:

1. Go to SETTINGS
2. Click on WIDGETS on the side
3. Click on CREATE and choose the type of feed you would like to see

You can choose the type of Twitter Feed you want to display and fill in the necessary information. Once complete, you copy the embed code and go to your blog and paste it in the HTML widget option!

Look at mine on your top right of the blog --> 

That's what it looks like

Hope that helps.