Thing #11

I'm on to bigger and better things - I think. :) Having just completed Thing #11 I'm feeling pretty good about myself. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find enough time to get caught up. I feel pretty good that I'm half-way finished.

I think I like my method of finding feeds better than some of these tools. First, Feedster would never load. I waited several minutes, went back to it, nothing...So I skipped it. Google Blog Search was very similar to the general Google search that I use regularly, so it was definitely the easiest because I was most familiar with it. Topix was basically all news and I was not interested in subscribing to any of those news feeds. Besides, each article was followed by numerous comments, some inflammatory, some ignorant, some possibly thoughtful. I really don't like reading comments from other people about news articles, and the comments sections wasted so much space on the page, that I didn't bother checking out very many. Syndic8 was probably the most confusing. The search brought up results, but they didn't make a lot of sense when you clicked on the link. Not much information was listed, and it was difficult to figure out if it was something usable. Finally, Technorati was a little better than most, not as good as Google Blog Search, in my opinion.

Overall, I felt Google served me better; but that's the way I always find things on the Internet. I wanted a good local news feed and was pleased to find one that centers on Mesquite and the surrounding areas. Since my primary interests are genealogy and scrapbooking, those are the two things I focused on while I used each of the search sites - the ones that loaded, anyway. I was able to subscribe to a local news feed; a few genealogy blogs, including some useful tools for researchers; a tutorial blog for my Paint Shop Pro program; and several scrapping blogs. I really can't think of any unusual ones that I found since genealogy and scrapbooking are pretty straight-forward sites. I did, however, find some rather interesting news stories while searching for a local news feed.

The fun part comes when I try to check all this stuff, finish the staff development, work on my scrapping, work on my genealogy, and find time to clean house and sleep - not to mention planning to set up a blog for my scrapbooking. :)

If you see me wandering the streets looking dazed and confused, just point me to the nearest computer and I'll be fine.