Thing 4: RSS Feeds and NewsReaders

My readers' indulgence is requested.  I had to get my previous (ranting / whining) post off my chest before I could turn my thoughts back to addressing Thing 4.

The good news is I had a lot of fun with RSS feeds and think that they are a wonderful idea--basically an updating of the magazine subscription concept for print media.

You know how you can go out to look for the magazines you want and buy them at the store?  That's like visiting your favorite blogsites periodically, checking for new posts.  Your other option is to subscribe to magazines and have them snail-mailed to you.  That's like an RSS feed.

It makes good sense.  It's also addicting.  If I had infinite amounts of leisure time, I'd subscribe to a lot of magazines.  Unfortunately, my leisure time is extremely limited, so I confine myself to reading magazines while waiting for my appointment at the doctor's office.

So I told myself going into this exploration of RSS feeds that I should only sign up for a handful of feeds, and they had to be ones I really, really wanted.  I also vowed to keep my selections weighted more toward the professional (library-related) end of the spectrum than toward the pop-culture or purely personal-interest ends.

(You realize, of course, that this means my spectrum must be triangular rather than linear.  This is intentional, I assure you.  No, really.)

So, after doing the background reading / viewing, I signed up for a Bloglines account.

Bloglines, by the way, has in addition to its primary site, a new beta site which had some interesting features.  Unfortunately, I didn't pay attention to the difference between the two sites at first and got very confused.

I'd log on.  Things would look different.  I wouldn't be able to find a feature I'd previously used. . . .  Once I finally got that figured out, I regrouped and chose 7 feeds in addition to the default Bloglines / News feed.

They are:

Dilbert Daily Strip and Get Fuzzy, two cartoons I enjoy but have read only sporadically since I don't subscribe to a newspaper at home.  (Newsflash: RSS feeds replace print as Virtual Unicorn's syndicated comic strip delivery medium of choice.  Western civilization falls.  Film at 11 p.m.)

Get Fuzzy is about your average guy, Rob, and his two pets: an easy-going dog and a hyper-intense cat.  Pets are personal, and so is my Get Fuzzy feed.  Dilbert, on the other hand, is about a motley crew of engineers struggling to realize poorly defined goals under ridiculous working conditions.  I consider Dilbert extraordinarily work-related.

I also signed up for the Publishers Weekly--Children's Books News and Jacksonville Public's Library Storytime feeds.  I guess that makes my area of interest within library service pretty obvious.  (Can anyone guess which department of the Alachua County Library District I work in?)  So these two feeds are work-related, too.

Also work-related--see how on-task I am?--are Helene Blowers's LibraryBytes and NEFLIN's Blah Blah Blah Blog.  I want you to know right now that these two choices were not a suck-up to the 23 Things @ NEFLIN prize-awarding committee.  I have been intending to subscribe to them all along.  I just didn't know how.

See?  23 Things @ NEFLIN has addressed my needs and taught me useful skills already.  Thank you, NEFLIN, and Ms. Blowers.  I intend to follow both blogs religiously.  (This paragraph is the suck-up.  Do I get a prize now?  If so, I want a subscription to Bengals Illustrated.  In hardcopy.  Snail-mailed to me.)

Okay, almost there.  The last RSS feed I subscribed to was Rotten Tomatoes: Movies.  It's a compendium of movie reviews with a rating assigned according to how many film critics found a particular movie "fresh" (that is, recommended it) versus how many found it "rotten" (advised against seeing it).

It's customizable so that you can look at an amalgam of all reviewers' opinions, just those of the "top" (nationally famous) reviewers, or just those of the reviewers of your choice.  A thoroughly nifty idea, and I've used it for years, mostly by clicking on review links found at IMDb.com (Internet Movie Database).

As an added bonus, since I get asked fairly regularly at work about movie content--which films are suitable for children, which are too "adult" for teens, etc.--my subscription to this feed, too, is actually work related as well.

So that's the saga of my Bloglines RSS feeds.  I'm still shocked that I can't find exactly the kind of blog I want dedicated to bengal cats.  I felt sure somebody would be doing one just like what I've been envisioning by now.  I guess not.

Why am I so desperate for such a blog?  Guess who just adopted a young, rescued bengal?  Yours truly.  Yesterday.  He's gorgeous but very disoriented and distressed.  He's been crying piteously since we brought him home.

The cat we already have (the new bengal is supposed to become her playmate) is in a towering snit.  She hopes a meteor will crash from the sky, obliterating him and if possible, me along with him.  There is now a 100% chance that my existing cat is plotting to kill me.

So if no one is already blogging about bengals in the way I'd like to see, perhaps I should start such a blog myself.  After I finish 23 Things @ NEFLIN.  In my copious spare time.  Provided I live that long.

Thing 3: Blog Search Engines

Hello, world.  After spending the weekend totally out of commission due to illness, I find myself returning to 23 Things @ NEFLIN feeling very behind.  All my good intentions to do Things 3 and 4 over the weekend in flames!

Oh, well.  No time like the present.  So back to business.

I spent a couple of lunch breaks last week exploring Technorati and some time this morning on Google Blog Search, comparing features, ease of use, relevance of search results, etc.

My search term was bengal cats.  This is a fairly new breed of domestic housecat that is becoming very popular because of the beauty of their exotic markings, which may resemble those of a cheetah, a jaguar, a snow leopard, or an ocelot.

Due to their growing popularity and inherently photogenic nature, I thought there would be a million blogs from which to choose.  But not so.  I did find some good ones (NOTE: define good as interesting to me) but not nearly as many as I'd have thought.

I have to say I found Google Blog Search infinitely easier to use than Technorati.  Technorati seems to be universally praised as among the most used and useful blog search tools, and I'm sure it is, but I found it not as transparent as I would have liked.

It appears to have been thoughtfully put together, with a plethora of features, the value of many of which I'm sure will become apparent to me in time.  I will definitely be back to explore Technorati further.  It just wasn't giving me the number of useful search hits I was expecting.

With a general search, the search term bengal cats returned nearly 800 hits, mostly blogposts that mentioned a bengal cat somewhere in the text rather than a blog devoted to the subject of bengal cats.  I sampled a few of them, but this was too large a pool.

I did a bit better with Technorati's advanced search when I entered my search phase into the find posts tagged field.  I got less than 70 hits--few enough to actually browse through.

I liked the videos that popped up.  There are a couple of hilarious ones featuring bengals vying for an exercise wheel: "Bengal Cats Fighting for the Exercise Wheel" and "3 Bengal Cats on Exercise Wheel."  I could watch those all day.  (I could also have found those simply by going to YouTube.)

I did come across one useful blog  which also publishes a magazine called Bengals Illustrated.  (They claim to have a swimsuit issue.)  Basically eye candy for bengal buffs.

My cavil is that I came across this one indirectly, in a link on one of the not-so-useful blog sites I visited.  The Bengals Illustrated blog did not come up on Technorati on its own.  Disappointing, as this was the most relevant site I found using this search engine.

Actually, besides the magazine and the exercise wheel videos, the two most worthwhile posts I encountered on Technorati were one entitled "Thirteen Rules for Dealing with Sociopaths," where a bengal cat is mentioned as the hapless victim of a neighbor's hyper-aggressive nonbengal cat) and another in which the blogger (Michael M) concludes that there is a 78% chance that his cats are plotting to kill him.

While funny, everything except the Bengals Illustrated blog were not exactly on topic.  Worse, they took a lot of digging to find.

Thank heavens I tried Google Blog Search next.  It was reassuringly simple to use and, for the bengal cats search at least, yielded more useful results more quickly.  Four relevant blogs popped up on the first page of search results.  Subsequent pages of search results were not as helpful as the first, but at least I got usable results fast.  For a beginner like me, that's important.

I think for now I'll probably turn to Google Blog Search for quick-and-dirty results and try Technorati when I need something more highly refined.  Quick forays into Blogpulse, Bloglines, and Ice Rocket yielded no useful results.  I look forward to exploring these further and trying out some of the other Blog Search Engines, but I feel I've spent enough time on Thing #3 and must forge ahead to Thing #4.

Enough said!