So our conversation today revolved around how we manage all these blogs we are supposed to follow as part of the peer review and collaborative component for this course. The tool we will use is called an aggregator. An aggregator is used to consolidate RSS feeds so that it manages all of your blog subscriptions. Consider it your digital paperboy.In class we spoke of a couple of ways to manage these feeds. An online option is to use a service such as Bloglines. This type of service allows you access to your RSS feeds from anywhere you have an Internet connection. You will need to create a free user account to uniquely identify your feeds. One example of a local feed reader (another name for aggregator) is SharpReader. But you will find many others at the bottom of the Wikipedia article on aggregators.

To make your life easier, I have created an export of the blog feeds from our course as an OPML file. An OPML file allows you to import a bunch of feeds much like you can import your bookmarks from one browser to another (such as from Internet Explorer to Firefox). The link to the OPML file is available here. On this page you will find a link call Web Expressions blogroll. To download the file, right-click on the link and click either Save Target As (in Internet Explorer) or Save Link As (in Firefox). Save the file to your desktop to make it easy to find.

Ok, so now you have an OPML file. Big whoop, now what? Well to make use of this file, you need to use the import feature in either Bloglines, SharpReader or your aggregator of choice. In SharpReader, click File -> Import and select the webex.opml file from your desktop. With Bloglines, click on My Feeds and then click the option to Edit. At the bottom of the Edit window you will see a link to Import Subscriptions. Follow the directions from there and your new subscriptions will show up in My Feeds.

Hey Mac crew, I haven’t forgotten you. Try using BlogBridge to manage your feeds. If you have questions, post them as comments here.