CityLibrariesLearning RSS

The CityLibrariesLearning RSS activity is up, providing a bit of information about RSS and encouraging us to choose a reader and subscribe to a few feeds.

To the extent that I use RSS at home, I use an excellent Firefox add-on called NewsFox. Doing without at work felt like a bit of a hardship. Still, I elected to use My Yahoo! as my reader, to subscribe to the feeds of some of the blogs from our Learning 2.0 program.

The first thing that leapt out was that none of the blogs seemed to have RSS links or buttons anywhere on them (again, I'm used to Firefox displaying available RSS automatically in the URL bar). It took a disgracefully long time for me to realize that adding /feed/ to the blog's URL made it into that blog's feed URL. Then I thought I'd better take a moment to add a link to my own blog to spare other's the suffering (not that the audience is there, but, you know, that's not the point).

(Fellow confused Learning 2.0 people, can find help at Neal's Analog is Here blog.)

Still, minor frustrations aside, I did enjoy the exposure to other RSS readers, and I probably will keep using My Yahoo! for work-related feeds just for its convenience. The hard part is trying not to feel old simply because I still kind of prefer Usenet (a kind of social network popular during the Bronze Age)...

Rejection

One of my short stories was just rejected (specifically, the first submission of the first story I wrote after deciding to get my writing back on track).

Not the depressing experience it could have been. This rejection was in response to a rewrite request, and it was extremely kind and constructive, so a "good" rejection. Given that this was the first of my new attempts, I find the result heartening. Not as heartening as a sale, of course, but still not remotely soul-destroying.

Despite having a bit of a time shortage at the moment, I know I need to get more out there -- so I'll naturally send this one on to someone else as soon as possible, and get some new things out there as well. The goal becomes having enough out at one time that individual rejections don't... matter as much.