Friday, August 3, 2007

Week 4, Thing 9: Explore MERLIN and then locate a few other useful library-related blogs and/or news feeds

Well.. I've survived this task... I did located the RSS feed "subscribe" button. I believe this button should have quotation marks around it as it doesn't subscribe you to anything. After looking at the html code and contemplating where I was supposed to paste the lovely color coded html code,* I gave up and called our help desk**. Apparently, clicking on subscribe essentially brings you to a page that will give you a web address that you can copy and then open up your bloglines account to actually subscribe to it. Gee... why didn't they just say so instead of having a button that pretends it actually does what it advertises? It would have saved a lot of time! =)

I've come to a conclusion through looking at all the different search tools for blogs/RSS feeds... there are far too many people on the internet posting far too much stuff! Yes, I can see if I wanted to read a million peoples' reactions to the I-35W incident, having these searches would be handy and it will give you tons of things to read. However, it doesn't seem to do as well when trying to find a blog or newsfeed that focuses on a particular topic. Perhaps I didn't know where to look, but I didn't really see a blog-subject search.

Ah well... I've learned a lot this week and am happy to say... 9 down! Only 14 to go!


*I do have to admit, there are programmers out there who would not have taken the time to write their code that neat, let alone color code it! Kudos to the programmer(s).

**The staff there deserve a raise after the countless calls they undoubtedly get from frustrated staff who can't figure out if the problems they are having is because this is essentially a self-taught course that feels like the blind leading themselves OR if it's because there is actually an error with the page and it is not working as anticipated.

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