Keeping Up to Date Optional extras Advanced: use Google Reader to monitor RSS feeds RSS feeds are not just for watching blogs, or the news and weather! There are many different kinds of RSS feed awaiting your discovery. For example, if you do a regular search, you could save yourself time by setting up an RSS feed for new results from your search on the search engine or database where you regularly search. It can make your iGoogle start page a bit cluttered if you put every news feed onto it as a gadget. You can opt to create a Google Reader account instead – or as well as. Google Reader can put a gadget onto your start page, too! As with most tools covered in the 23 Things course, the one presented here is just one of many similar tools available. See Optional Extras on this week’s 23 Things blog for further reading to find out about other RSS feed readers available to you. The simplest way to create a Google Reader account is to subscribe to the 23 Things RSS feed again (as above) but this time select Google Reader when you are given the option: Google will take you to your very own Google Reader page. Add feeds to your Google Reader account Once you have created your Google Reader account, you can add feeds to it. There are lots of ways to do this, but one easy way is to keep an eye out for the orange RSS logo. You will know if a webpage or blog has an RSS feed as you will see a button (usually orange) similar to these:

Go to a blog or website of your choice, click on the orange logo and you either be given easy options to add it to your Google reader or you might find the URL (web address) for the feed – even if you can’t see the URL, you can right click to copy the link location. Copy an RSS URL to add a subscription to your Google Reader manually. For example, the BBC weather for Coventry page has a discrete RSS button:

When you right click on it, you can copy the link location, which is: http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/weather/forecast/2199/Next3DaysRSS.xml Then, go back to your Google Reader page for the next step, which is to click on “Add a subscription”:

Paste your URL into the box and click on “Add”. (Note that you could alternatively use this box as a search box, to look for RSS feeds of interest: try looking for a local theatre, to find out what’s on.)

You will now find that you have a subscription to your new RSS feed showing in the left hand column.

You can search for more RSS feeds or you can just collect them as you go along, browsing the web and reading peoples’ blogs, keeping an eye out for the orange RSS logo. Note that you can also Manage your subscriptions on Google Reader. This will help you to delete unwanted subscriptions, and to group those you read most often or those on a particular theme together. Thus you will be able to avoid the situation where there are over 400 items waiting for you to read! Also note the “Mark all as read” button, which will help you to identify when there is really new stuff to interest you:

If you want to explore even more, you could keep playing with Google Reader, or you could explore other feed readers, such as Bloglines, Newsgator, Feedreader or FeedPixel.com. Have you got a smart phone? You could explore using a feed reader on your phone: vital for anyone wanting to read cricket commentary from several sources at once! To read more before you explore more, please do look at the Library’s Support for Research pages on RSS feeds, which are linked to from the 23 Things blog entry for Things 5 & 6, under the heading “Optional Extras”. Have fun exploring RSS feeds!