It is the final day of my spring break. I am sitting at the desk with my attendance records, going over the official copy and justifying it with the record that I keep in my grade book. It’s a simple chore. Profoundly unrewarding. I have been doing it for many hours because I don’t stick with it.

I have also been trying to figure out how to group the feeds in Shrook so that I don’t have to look through hundreds of feeds - Shrook calls them “channels” - to find the ones that I want. Shrook comes preloaded with many feeds already activated in what it calls a “library.” It’s a lot like iTunes. Even though the program has a Groups item in the file menu, and enables the user to create a group, there does not seem to be any way to actually add a feed to the group. When I try to drag and drop the channel icon into the new group folder icon I get a persistant ghost image of the icon and associated text that sticks on the screen no matter what I do. It stays on the screen until I quit the program. And nothing goes in the damn folder. Some fun! Another promising feature permits the user to create what are called “Smart Groups.” This is potentially very useful. It’s like an email filter. You can apply rules to the folder so that certain kinds of content will be included in it. Great idea! I had a folder based on the titles of the blogs that I wanted to include from the Shrook library. It actually worked. But when I realized that there was apparently no way to add more items, to make the group smarter so to speak, that feature became a bit less attractive. I could have the smart group, but I would have to recreate the whole thing if I wanted to change it. So it’s not really that smart. I explored an Import/export opml function. So I went to my Bloglines feeds and found the export link. It doesn’t exactly export anything. All I found was a web page with the xml tree. I copied and pasted that into a text editor and saved the file on my computer. Then when I tried to import it, I got an error message from Shrook that says Shrook will only import valid xml data.

Ok, then I got serious. I exported an opml file from Shrook, the whole library, the only file Shrook will cough up, to see what kind of file it likes to make. I renamed it and imported it back into Shrook to see if it would choke on its own file. It swallowed the thing and set it up as a new group. Well…I then spent a good little while copying and pasting the data from the bloglines opml document into the proper xml format for Shrook with my text editor. It works. I saved the document and now if I want to expand the folder I can edit the text document and reimport it. This seems like a huge pain in the ass for a simple organizational task.

I probably didn’t need to do any of that. But there are no help manuals on the Shrook promotional site. Shrook.com is down due to server upgrade complications. I don’t know if there is a manual there, anyway. I may find the easy way to do this. But what fun would that be? I’d have time to finish those report cards. Exploring new technologies involves much, much time that I used to spend doing…I wonder.