Lately I’ve been running into some of you at stores, and I’m often asked, “How do I know what’s new on your blog?” There are three ways to read blogs:
1) Bookmark the site and check it yourself. Most people who are new to blogs do this. You’re probably doing it now, and it’s great. However, once you start reading MORE blogs, because I’m pointing you to great sites like this and this, and my new favorite for great laughs, this one, your bookmark list gets huge and suddenly it takes a lot of time to check all these blogs every day for updates.
2) Subscribe to my blog via email. If you’d rather the new posts come to you directly, you can click on Subscribe by Email over there on the right sidebar (see it?) and a company called Feedburner will email you once a day with my new posts. Wait–don’t subscribe yet, because the downside to subscribing via email is that you’re probably already getting a lot of email (I know I am!) and once you have a few blogs to read, the emails really pile up. You may prefer #3 below.
3) Sign up for a Feed Reader. What’s a feed reader? A feed reader keeps all your blogs in a big list for you, it will tell you which ones have new posts to read, and all you have to do is click on the title to read it. I recently switched to a reader (I use Google Reader, but you can also use Bloglines, Yahoo and others) because it’s so much faster to skim through the new articles and choose what I’d like to read. You still get to see the photos and graphics in each post, but you’ll miss anything in the blog’s sidebars (ads, but also links to other posts, blogrolls, etc.) I can even sort my blogs into categories: financial, parenting, entertainment, news, etc. On most blogs, you’ll see a large orange square, the RSS feed (technical definition here), that will “feed” the blog to your reader. If you’d like to subscribe to my blog, just click that orange square in the top right sidebar.
For many of you, blogs and readers are new concepts. Please let me know if you have any questions. I’m no expert–but I’m learning a lot as I navigate my way through the blogosphere!
Photo by shakeelakbar1
I highly recommend Google Reader!
I love this post – do you mind if I write a post about it and link to your blog? I have been wanting to write one like this for a while? Let me know.
Of course, send them my way!
Great post, I touched on this in my blog. It’s important for me to be orderly, and Google Reader helps with that. For blogs at least.
I still don’t quite understand the readers, but I’m assuming it’s like the new blogger follower. On the dashboard you can enter any blog you are following and it will give a few lines of each as they are updated! I love it!