If I’ve learned nothing else in the last 18 months of being a librarian, I’ve learned that everyone has their own preferred method for keeping up with the world around them. I heart RSS. Unless there’s a feed, a page is pretty much dead to me. I won’t remember to go back and check later for updates. I won’t.
I still remember the day that my colleagues recommended I use Thunderbird for my email client because it’s easy, customizable, and “it has an RSS reader!” The first time I heard that, I figured I just hadn’t heard right. They must have said some word that I didn’t hear and it sounded to me like “r s s.” The second time somebody said that I realized that I’d run across another library acronym…. So I asked what the heck this RSS thing was. Somebody explained it. I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting,” and promptly forgot about it until I started reading people’s blogs last spring. Then it all became clear.
It’s kind of like when you first got a microwave and you thought, “that might be useful sometimes.” Now you can’t imagine life without it. That’s the way it was for me and RSS.
Anyway, I also keep up with a couple of email lists, but I read those through my gmail account because I was being crushed by my inbox every morning, even with handy filters and folders set up. So now my work inbox is just that. It’s my inbox for email I receive from or about work. I can (usually) keep up with it, and I’m much less overwhelmed.
But what works for me doesn’t work for everyone so, by popular request, I’ve added a “subscribe by email” link under my RSS feed on the left-hand column. If you prefer getting my posts in your inbox, now you can.
And while we’re on the topic, I just found out (while setting up the email subscription option) that my Feedburner stats say that I’m only getting 40% of my subscribers through Bloglines! If that’s true of all of my feeds, that means I have somewhere around 150 subscribers! I had NO idea. I wish there were a way to track my atom and rss feeds the way Feedburner tracks its own feed.