I thought I could set up this weblog (or ‘blog’) for the Library. Any news can be posted here immediately. I hope to supply information on all aspects of the library, and resources on the world wide web.
To easily keep up with what’s appearing here, either visit this site regularly or subscribe to the ATOM news feed. First you need to have a ‘feed reader’. You can either download one from the web or subscribe to a web-based one. Then you can susbcribe to our feed using the ATOM VALID button in the left hand column (right click on it and choose ‘copy link location’, then paste it into the feed URL box in your feed reader).
ATOM is a newer, open source, type of news feed. A more common type of feed is ‘RSS’ (’Really Simple Summary’ or ‘Rich Site Summary’). You may have seen the orange RSS (or sometimes XML) buttons on websites. The BBC website provides a straightforward introduction to RSS - but it’s not quite as straightforward now I’ve looked at it. This article in the Lockergnome website is better - or, this from Librarians’ Index to the Internet is even clearer!
An easy (and free) way to subscribe to news feeds, which does not require you to download any software, is to use a web-based news feed reader. I have found Bloglines to be excellent. A ‘Subscribe with Bloglines’ button is included in left hand column, which you can click on once you have set up a (free) Bloglines account. Instructions are on the Bloglines website. There are millions of news feeds now on the web, covering any subject you could be interested in. Many websites, not just blogs, now offer news feeds.
Bloglines has a key word search facility to find news feeds on a particular subject. There are also many dedicated weblog search engines: Waypath is one of the better ones, and blo.gs is very lively. Waypath, like Bloglines, allows you to create an RSS feed out of a search! The traditional web search engines will locate weblogs and news feeds, but it is not always easy to distinguish which results are blogs. Using the Google web search engine you can add [inurl:archive] (without the square brackets) to your search term which can narrow your search to blogs (which usually have archives).
We hope launch a brand new Library Guide soon. This will include sections on news feeds, along with many other resources available on the web.