Just about a month ago, I made the best ever internet discovery. And for those of you who already know, please forgive my over excitement! But, the discovery of the handy dandy blog reader, is.. well, wow! What a time saver!
If you know me, I love to read blogs. So much inspiration and good stuff out there. Well, I always book marked the ones I liked (or tried to remember them). That meant that I had to go back to each and every one of them to see if anything new had been posted. Sometimes this got a little annoying, especially when quite a few of my favorites had nothing new to read. This also wasted quite a bit of time for me, and I don't need one more thing to waste time on these days.
Well, I had heard about subscribing to a blog, but never really checked out what that meant. Once I got over that, all I can say is "what was I waiting for?!"
Here is how it works:
1. You pick a blog reader that you like. I use the one from google. But there is also bloglines, newsgator, yahoo, and others.
2. Open up/set up your account. With google, there is a button I added to my toolbar, which makes adding new blogs really easy.
3. When you come across a blog you like, simply click the subscribe button on your toolbar or on the blog itself. For example, on this blog, I have a place on the right side where you can subscribe via the most popular feed readers. You can select new posts or you can subscribe to the comments if you want to follow along with what others have to say here.
4. On many blogs (this one included), you can also sign up for email notifications when something new has been added. This is a great way to keep on top of things if you are not a a crazy blog addict like me!
5. Open your blog reader whenever you feel like having a good internet read. All the new posts from your favorite blogs will be waiting for you! It's kind of like opening up the newspaper every morning (only way more fun and exciting).
The only thing I don't like about this system is that you are reading the material straight from your blog reader, so you don't get to see all the fun info, pictures, etc. that people have all over their blogs. But, you can always open up the blog to read it, which is what I do every now and again to leave comments and check out if they have any new goodies for me on their sidebars.
Oh, and some people have their settings set so you only get a little teaser on your blog reader so you will HAVE to open up their blog to read the whole post.
I think this is the best way to manage all the blogs I like to read. I do go through my reader periodically and get rid of blogs that I no longer find interesting or I find myself skipping over more often than not. No sense spending hours reading blogs every day. I DO have other things to do with my time, (really).
Hope this helps. Feel free to leave a note if you have any other tips or tricks for saving time cruising around the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment