3. Links & feeds

Thurs., Oct. 30

Post #3: Link list: First, open an account on delicious.com, and learn how to add links; it will help if you add a button to your browser.  Do the tutorials to learn more about how delicious operates.  Then start surfing the internet looking for websites and articles about the place you'll be studying, relevant resources in NYC (like Czeck Center New York and Germany in NY), news articles, and the books you'll be reading (make a link to its google book or amazon page for the books).  Add at least a dozen links to your delicious account, and tag them with appropriate terms which will help sort the list as it gets longer: museums, restaurants, exhibits, events, sports, news, etc.

Second, learn how to subscribe to RSS feeds, and set up subscriptions to at least a half dozen news feeds that feature travel articles or news articles about the place you're going. Your browser may have its own RSS reader already installed, or you can register on a site like Google Reader or Newsgator.  (You might start with the Newsgator video tutorial.)  Here are some tips for finding good feed sources.  When you come across a particularly good article, make a link to it on your delicious list.

Third, write a post in which you discuss some of the websites and articles you came across doing the delicious list and RSS feeds.  In your post, make a few links to the items on your list and articles from the feeds, and include the link to your delicious list (which should go delicious.com/yourusername).

To make a link in a post: Just type in the name of the website or the title of the article you're linking to, then select the text and click on the icon that looks like a chain (below the "body" box), and paste in the URL, then click on submit.  NB: This feature of the website does not work in older versions of Safari, so use Firefox or a recent version of Safari.

And finally, the reading assignment: These readings are not about links & feeds, so you don't have to do them before you do your post; they are intended to help continue the discussion of travel, tourism, guidebooks, etc.

Read:

  1. Alain de Botton, from The Art of Travel, chapter 2: "On Travelling Places" (available through the NYU ebrary here, or as pdf below)
  2. Daniel Boorstin, "From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel," from The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (pdf below)
  3. Aldous Huxley, "Guide-books," from Along the Road (pdf below)
  4. Roland Barthes, "The Blue Guide," excerpt from Mythologies