Week 3

I love the RSS video in this week's Project Play information! I think it does a really good job of explaining a pretty complex concept in simple terms. And I love that they were explaining a techie topic all with paper and a whiteboard! Cool beans.

RSS is one of my favorite topics at the moment. I've been using it to subscribe to blogs in Google Reader for a while now. (I started out in Bloglines, but decided I prefer Google Reader instead.) I recently tweaked the OWLS web sites to pull in feeds from the various OWLS blogs we have created. On the OWLSweb homepage, you can see the feed for our blog Carpe Hootem being pulled in. And on the OWLSnet homepage, you can see feeds for our Network News blog and one for InfoSoup Development. Another pretty intense example is one set up by Evan on the More Read Feeds page on InfoSoup, where we have feeds from lots of different national blogs pulled in to share book reviews and other book news right within the OPAC.

Feeds are a great way to provide instantly updated content on your web site with very little work required on your part. If you're part of an OWLS member library, and you're interested in finding out more about providing feeds on your library's web site, be sure to contact me or Evan.