Feed thing

I have a little bit of familiarity with RSS feeds, mostly from accidentally clicking the RSS button when I'm heading to the library's list of new titles. I have never really liked the look of google reader, so I've just stuck with visiting my favorite websites individually. However, I think that I will make the switch to using the RSS feeds on my google reader from now on. There are several websites that I like to check on a regular basis, but my internet at home is not currently working. When I do get to a computer, I have a hard time remembering all the things that I want to check. Google Reader will help me with that (I don't know why but I always thought it was just for blogs, like the kind people post using blogger. Now I know better.)

Since our assignment was to sign up for two RSS feeds, the ones I chose were ZooBorns and Cute Overload. I love animals. I mentioned in an earlier post that I could look at pictures of animals all day long. Cute Overload is just a place to show off pictures, but ZooBorns actually serves a purpose. It showcases new baby animals at zoos and aquariums all over the globe. They range from animals that are at no risk to those that are critically endangered. It's very exciting to see zoos helping to bring these animals back from the brink of extinction. And, of course, most of them are just plain adorable.

As for the feeds versus visiting the individual sites, I think there are advantages and disadvantages to both. Certainly the RSS feeds are more convenient, as they show you everything on one place. There is something missing from not visiting the sites. The people that maintain them (usually) put a lot of effort into the page design, and staring at Google Reader is definitely less colorful than going to each site. Additionally, when I logged into Google Reader I had more than one hundred unread posts waiting for me. I had already looked at these posts on my blogger homepage, so I guess now I have to scroll past them to get them to go away on my Google Reader page. I think I will definitely be using the RSS feeds of various websites in the future.