I recently decided I was going to try and grab lots of feeds from local sources like libraries, city-hosted event calendars and the like and see if I could come up with a good radar on family friendly things to do. I’d much rather be out and about on the weekend with my family than watching TV or surfing the net (No, really, I mean it.).

After a few weeks of watching feeds from:

• Seattle.gov
• Seattle Weekly
• The Olympian Online
• Timberland Regional Library
• King County Library
• Tacoma Public Library
• and third party aggregator, AmericanTowns.com

all I can say is that I’m disappointed. Tons of duplicate posts, posts in the future (Pro tip: event date is not the same as post date), poor feed customization, lots of irrelevant items (at least for my needs) and for several sites, no feeds at all (Another pro tip: if you have a database, you should have RSS feeds.).

Of the hundreds of items that have come through my reader since I started, there was only one that was relevant: a “Shred Event” hosted by my local BBB (Two bags of documents gone and Connor thought the garbage truck was cool.).

The one useful site I managed to find was ParentMap (focused on Puget Sound). Though their feeds could use some customization (hope to send some feedback to them soon), I’m square in their target audience and their content is definitely worth my attention.

I’d hoped to provide a way cool-link list/OPML to share, but linking to Parent Map is the best I can offer. If anyone has other suggestions, I’d love to hear them.