Welcome to Week 6 - did you ever think you'd get here??

This week we'll take a look at RSS Feeds and RSS Aggregators (also called Newsreaders). These are great time saving tools that let you keep up  to date with all the latest news from your favourite websites. Take a look at Coleg Llandrillo's LibeRaCe homepage daily news headlines on the right of the screen - they are all updated by RSS feed. The College Moodle homepage also has RSS feeds on the right of the screen for news headlines and the Library Blog. See, RSS is everywhere..............   

So, what is RSS?

It's really just a piece of code that you can copy into a website/blog/wiki/RSS aggregator that updates automatically each time a new headline or piece of information is added to your chosen site. You know a site has an RSS available when you see this icon at the top of the screen -

An RSS Aggregator is a service that allows you to add a large number of RSS feeds into an online page. You then get to see all the new headlines/posts added daily in one place, instead of having to visit many different sites to get tha lastest news. Good examples of this service include Pageflakes, Bloglines and Newsgator. You might also see the term OPML being used. This is a file type being used to share lists of RSS feeds between different aggregator services.

The site we have chosen to explore RSS and Aggregators is Pageflakes.com*. You can set up your own account to explore the features. Pageflakes is an excellent aggregator, but also displays practical examples of other topics you have already covered such as widgets, social bookmarking  and collaborative editing . Take a look at the LibeRaCe Pageflakes 'Pagecast' (open access RSS feed pages) complied by the librarians to keep you up to date with Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 developments.

Getting Started:

- Setting up a Pageflakes account.

- Customising your pages

- Adding your own RSS feeds.

Don't forget to: 

- Note your username and password if you set up a Pageflakes account.

- Record what you achieved this week on your blog and tag your post as 'Web Quest'.

 If you get stuck reply to the Quest Post to get help from other participants or see the guides on the Library Moodle

*the use of pageflakes.com is only a suggestion. Feel free to use another provider of your choice like bloglines.com or netvibes.com.