Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Week 2: Setting up an RSS reader

What a fun exercise. I feel like a whole new world has opened up for me. I had seen the RSS icon on numerous pages, but had never bothered to find out what it actually meant. Discovering the Google Reader has found me yet another way to spend more time on the computer. What a great way to get current information on items of interest. Before I even subscribed to topics I was personally interested in, I enjoyed scrolling down the recommended items and finding cartoons, amazing photographs and a myriad stream of unrelated items.

I popped the Google Reader into my favorites and started looking for feeds. Finding and subscribing to them is fast and easy and I already realize I am going to have to cut back as I discover the ones that I especially like and let some of the others go. So far I have 11 feeds with information on gardening, green living, healthy cooking, organizing and DIY home improvement. Thinking they held the greatest content, I picked the feeds that had the most subscriptions and avoided the ones with few. Before too long I hope to shape my Google Reader into a manageable, personalized content reader.

Monday, May 3, 2010

Week 1: Getting started

Getting started blogging is tougher than I thought. Thinking that I would compose blogs containing lots of thought-provoking ideas didn't seem to appear so I decided to keep my thoughts simple or able to fit in a nutshell. Even though this is my first post and is one that I am quite late in publishing, I have been reading the blogs published by others and have enjoyed them. I think the 23Things idea is a great one and I have already learned new things.

Web 2.0 contains more ways to connect socially than I realized. I have had a Facebook account for about a year and have really enjoyed catching up with old friends and keeping in touch with family. I really don't understand Twitter and why people want to know what other people are doing every second of the day. They must have more free time than I do. The list of other ways to socialize seems to be growing as I see icons that I am unfamiliar with at the bottom of many pages. Reading blogs has never been a hobby of mine, but I have read several interesting ones since beginning this journey. Although another time-eater is not something that I really need, I find myself wanting to read a few of them regularly and get caught up hitting the "next blog" button. Looking forward to writing about Week 2 although still playing catch up.