Aggregating my feeds

Aggregation... The minute I read the material and view the CommonCraft video, I thought, "Wow! This is marvellous! At last, I get to gather all my readings in one place! And it will definitely save my time opening and downloading all the sites at one shot every morning!"

The LTC Wikipedia suggested a few aggregator sites, which I tried to view to see the differences. But I started off with Google Reader, since I already have the account there.

Not quite sure what to 'feed' my 'reader', so I started off with my collection of blogs. I have 7 blogs, but not all are "feedable". I could manage to aggregate 5 of them into my reader, one is not updated at all (I think I better delete that one off), and one more is set to private (RSS off) if I'm not mistaken because it's quite personal. I categorised them under a folder called "Sha905's Blogs".

Then I remembered I used to have favourite sites on IT, which mostly I've forgotten the links and the bookmarks were in previous PCs. Hhmm... But I remember 2 of them quite well because I used to view those sites every morning, back when I was still in IT department.

So I went to cnet.com and zdnet.com... CNet doesn't allow site feed, only article feed (sorry if my jargon is still in a "confusionist" language) - so I can't really 'feed' the site content, plus it has too many articles and I'm not going to waste my time reading and picking them up right now (for 'article feed').

Next, ZDNet. Marvellous! It's a news site, so it allows me to 'feed' the contents into my aggregator. Good! I categorised ZDNet under a folder called "Technology".

I also tried to 'feed' other sites I used to visit under the realm of Knowledge Management, but to no avail as well. This is because the contents are all in static HTML pages.

Even though I've read the materials before trying out the aggregation assignment, only when I did the hands-on that I realised... we can only 'aggregate feeds' from news sites or blog sites. The logic is there, because the content is organised in such a way that it's flexible to be 'fed' to sites (whattaheck am I talking about... food? :-S), not in the 'static HTML' way. Hhmm.. how to put it... Ah, never mind, forget it. I understand for myself, but I don't have time to explain it hehehe...!

So now, I have a Google Reader site. I will try out Blogline and Pageflakes somewhen later within the week, if time permits. I think Pageflakes site has potential in 'aggregating' my contents for subjects, so I'm thinking of creating Pageflakes sites for different subjects/topics.

Will keep updating...,
- Sha @ Teaching and Learning
15 Nov 2008