etc.

RSS intrigues me. I’ve been publishing all my blog content in RSS for as long as I’ve been blogging, mostly because Blogger makes it really easy to do. And I’ve been playing with receiving RSS feeds for a while as well, via Newzcrawler, AmphetaDesk, and Bloglines, each to varying degrees of satisfaction. I’ve sort of settled on Bloglines for no other reason than the fact that it’s web-based and means no downloads and a subscription list that is accessible from any of the four computers I use on a regular basis. But, as I’ve admitted elsewhere, I’m no RSS-aggregator convert because a lot of the reason why I read some of the blogs I read is because of their design, so taking the content out of the design context strips away a little bit of the desire to read those blogs.

What’s had me enthralled lately is content syndication through RSS. At my library, we’re building our own library blog for news & events, which will take our cumbersome news page and make it a lot easier to update and syndicate. Since we have four campus libraries, content published on the main blog will selectively be syndicated on the individual library pages, which beats the heck out of having to input the same news item on five different static pages (the main page and the four library pages). Nothing revolutionary here, it’s just nice to be able to get my hands into it and make it happen instead of just talking about it.

For a bit of practice, I’ve been playing with a personal multiple domain portal, where I’ve pulled all my own RSS feeds and fed them into a single page. All me, all the time, the ego! I’ve included external feeds too, my del.icio.us feed, and my buzznet feed to start, but I’ll probably end up adding my unalog feed and some others when they become a bit more robust. I’m still working on making the links work right, and it’s pretty sparsely designed, but the point was more about grabbing content than making it look good, which is what RSS is about isn’t it? (see above)

Which sort of reminds me: buzznet. I linked to it over on the linklog a couple of weeks ago and only just started playing with it this weekend. It’s a photoblog community where anyone can post to your photoblog by sending an email message. Post to mine by sending a message to etchesjohnson.post.share@buzznet.com with the picture you’d like to post as an attachment, your message’s subject line will be the title and the email body becomes the description. I can see this becoming a favourite image-sharing resource.