Week 4, Thing 8: RSS feeds (part 1)

"Learn about RSS feeds and set up your own feed reader." I admit this one seemed a bit daunting compared to the other tasks thus far, mainly because I have zero experience with RSS feeds. After reading the assignment, the first thing I did was watch the video "RSS in Plain English." It was awesome. Brief, entertaining, and informative. After watching it, I felt like I was ready to start setting up a feed reader, no worries. Now to go learn more about the different ones and make a choice.

Well, I looked at the home page for FeedReader and it had an almost overwhelming amount of info on all the marvelous things it could do for me. I had already decided not to use it, though, because the computer I mainly use for this course hasn't exactly got the largest hard drive and just doesn't need one more thing installed on it. Still, I had to check it out in the interest of being thorough (or perhaps it's just more evidence that I am somewhat obsessive-compulsive, but why split hairs?) Next, I looked briefly at Bloglines. I realized at this point that I had no idea what features I should actually care about. Perhaps I was a bit overconfident jumping in so quickly and ought to go back and try the "Feed Me" tutorial. It had screenshots from several of the readers, which was the only thing that kept me going -- the "RSS in Plain English" video was a much more appealing presentation of the material! Back to looking at readers. The sample screenshots from all of these things look pretty similar at first glance, so I'm finding it hard to see why I ought to choose one over another.

On to Google Reader. Hey, I already have a Google account; these guys are ready for me to jump right in, which is very appealing. But wait, what about Sage? I already use Firefox as my browser, so adding Sage to it would be an easy thing to try. But there is almost no info on the Sage download page to tell me what it can do for me. (Good thing there is a page with info from our 23 Things gurus!) Oh, how I hate making these decisions. What the heck, I'll try them both.