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Live session: RSS widgets and Personalised Home Pages – Sept 16, 2009

Sep 15th, 2009
by pollyalida.
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Classroom 2.0 Live has been sponsoring a great series of free on-line technology sessions for educators with Sue Waters. Called the Beginner Series, there’s lots of information for you even if you aren’t a beginner. I hope to have time to tune in on Wednesday night. Hope you do too!

Wed September 16, 2009 8pm–9pm (Eastern)
Where: Elluminate link- http://tinyurl.com/cr20live
What:  RSS widgets and Personalised Home Pages
In this third session on RSS we continue the discussion by looking at all the different ways you can use RSS widgets on websites and check out Personalised Homepages like NetVibes, PageFlakes and iGoogle for managing class information.

And make sure you check out all the other great programming, conversations and training on the Classroom 2.0 calendar – truly a terrific resource!

Google Reader : Tags have feeds

May 23rd, 2009
by pollyalida.
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wine-google-reader

I use my Shared Items feed from Google Reader to drop odds and ends of interesting items on the sidebar of this blog. Handy, but it’s just one feed.

I wanted to be able to create other topical feeds from all the stuff I sift through in Google Reader.  One way that came to mind was to bookmark interesting items in delicious, add unique tags and feed them out from there. Doable but an extra step or two.

Sifting through the Google Reader help files tonight in preparation for an RSS in Libraries class next week, I found an answer.

  • Tag the items you want to share with an appropriate topical tag.
  • Then on your Settings page, set that tag to public.
  • Voila, you have a public page for items with that tag and subsequently a feed that you can use as you like.

There’s also a handy option on the settings page to create a “clip” of the content with that tag. Copy and paste the code and you have a handy gadget for that tag on your blog or web page.

Since it’s the time of night for a glass of wine, the items I tagged were all about wine bargains!

ticTOCs Table of Contents Service

Jan 21st, 2009
by pollyalida.
2 comments

ticToCs aggregates the tables of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals from over 400 publishers. It’s easy to search for journals by title, subject or publisher. From there it’s simple to view the tables of contents and link to the publisher’s sites. If your campus has full text access, you’re all set. Even without full text access, this is a terrific current awareness service.

Rather get your tables of contents via RSS in your own feed reader? Select the journal titles of interest and export them as an OPML file. Import that file into Google Reader, Bloglines or other feed reader and all the titles will be added in one fell swoop.

What an incredible time saver this service is. Finding the RSS feeds for even a handful of journals can be time consuming, finding them for over 11,000 journals, wow! Thank you to consortium that put this together.

Updates to Wikispaces

Jan 2nd, 2009
by pollyalida.
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Wikispaces has a fresh new look to their site and has added some new features. And they’re still giving away ad-free wikis to educators.

New:

  • Create user accounts on your own: If you have an educator account, you can now enter up to 100 usernames (with or without email addresses) and Wikispaces creates user accounts and passwords for you. Great option for getting your students connected to your wiki in a hurry.
  • All your wikis are easy to get to from the green arrow at the top of every screen. Used to be a bit hidden on the side toolbar.

And though this isn’t new, it’s worth noting that Wikispaces makes it incredibly easy to incorporate content from other web services, including:

  • photos & slideshows
  • audio & video
  • chat sessions
  • RSS feeds
  • maps
  • polls
  • and much more.

FeedMyInbox – super easy rss to email

Oct 16th, 2008
by pollyalida.
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FeedMyInbox is a fairly new tool for getting RSS content via email. And it’s dead simple to use. Enter the URL for the feed and your email address. That’s it! You’ll get an email with a confirmation link and then you’ll start getting a single email every 24 hours for each feed you’ve subscribed too.

If you don’t know whether a site has an RSS feed, just enter the URL for the site itself. FeedMyInbox checks for you. If there’s more than one feed (try npr.org for example) you’ll get a list of feeds to choose from. Pretty slick.

And for bloggers who want to provide readers with quick way to let users sign up for their blog via email, create a link to FeedMyInbox and add your feed address on the end like this:

http://www.feedmyinbox.com/?feed=http://your.url.here

Plop it somewhere on the sidebar of your blog and you have an easy way to reach readers who aren’t using RSS feed readers.

Try it out: Subscribe to Polly’s Blog

There are other tools, like FeedBurner, that do this same thing by providing a box to put on the sidebar of your blog (see the right side of my blog). But I’ve found FeedBurner is a bit daunting to new bloggers.

RSS feeds for web searches

Aug 29th, 2008
by pollyalida.
1 comment

Most of us have a few (or many!) topics that we do repeat searches on in the big search engines. This might be a research topic you’re trying to keep up to date on, your library’s name or even your own name. An RSS feed for a subject search can save you some time by automatically send you recent changes in the top hits for your favorite search. (Reminds me of setting up SDI searches in Dialog many moons ago!) But none of the major search engines make it easy to set up an RSS feed for a general search.

So thanks to Digital Inspiration for this tip on how to create an RSS feed for a subject search (more…)