Making Your Life Easier with Google Reader

Ok girlies (and whatever guy floats in here, I guess) –

Everyone is starting BLOGS, yea!! Blogs are fun fun fun! One of the best reasons I love blogs is that they come with an RSS Feed.

RSS Feed – Def. – Basically means there are programs out there that will tell YOU when updated content that comes out on the Internet, rather than you going to your favorite websites all day and hitting ‘refresh’ to see if there is anything new. This is slowly changing the world (I’m not being dramatic!) as all of the content YOU want to see will come to YOU instead of you searching for it. Predictive marketing is coming and RSS will only help it. Although another great plus to RSS is that you can subscribe to things without your email address! No one knows who is subscribed to their content feeds… You are anonymous, which is SO nice sometimes. 🙂

Even if you have all of your favorite websites bookmarked, and it’s easy to ‘click’ on them, it will still add seconds, minutes, hours to your daily routine (depending on how stalkerish you are) and who has TIME for that crap? Not I.

** Google Reader (or any other reader for that matter) will only help you if you have 10+ blogs that you follow. Anything else you will probably get bored going to another site, waiting for it to load, etc, when you can just go to the site directly. But if you have quite a bit of content that you like to follow (and it has an RSS feed), RSS Readers are going to save you time and you are going to love it.

Other websites that are not blogs have RSS Feeds. You don’t have to be a blog to have an RSS Feed. Blogs usually come with the RSS feed built into a blogging system where other content, webmasters would have to set it up and setting it up can be a drag… This is why there are custom blogs out there who do NOT have an RSS Feed. BabySites is a journal entry style site, you would think RSS Feeds would be available, but they are not. Reason being, they created their own system years ago and are to damn busy to add an RSS Feed to join technology. Grow up people! Get an RSS FEED! 🙂 That’s my rant.

But as I was saying there are other places who do have RSS Feeds. News Headlines on all the biggies sites have RSS Feeds, podcasts usually have an RSS Feed… so they are out there.

So, an RSS Reader makes your life easier.

How Do You Use It?

Here is the definition of an Aggregator, an RSS Reader. Here is a list of feed aggregators. You can see Google Reader is under Web Based. Bloglines is also incredibly popular but Google Reader came out last year (two years ago?) and its popularity has skyrocketed because it ROCKS.

First, you need to go to Google Reader and sign up.
http://www.google.com/reader/

You need to have a Google Account to do this. If you already have a BlogSpot (Blogger) account, you are probably already good to go. So use your sign in information.

Here is what it will look like. You have your section on the left that will show all of your subscriptions, and the right side will show you all the content that comes through. Right now Google is offering you a tour. You get started by adding subscriptions!

Click on the ‘Get Started by Adding Subscriptions’ on the right hand side. It’s the long gray button with those words on it.

Google is cool and has tons of the popular feeds available for you to simply add on! What are you interested in? See ‘Fun’ has 6 feeds under it and the blue ‘Subscribe’ button. If you hover your mouse over the words “6 Feeds” you will find they are suggesting Colbert Reports, YouTube Most Viewed, and other things like that.

If you click on ‘More Bundles’.. there are a lot more choices. Celebrities has 5 different feeds. PerezHilton, PopSugar, and The Superficial are some of them. I used this choice to get started on my celebrity gossip addiction. 🙂 If you click on the ‘Subscribe’ button, it will tell you that you are ‘Subscribed’ and all of your new feeds will be listed on the left side!

It loads up the last 10 posts for you. If you click on one of the selections, all the posts will then load up on the right hand side. As you scroll down to read it, the selection will be marked as ‘Read’ and it will no longer be in your feed reader. You do have the option to unmark the selection as “read’. You can also add a Star to particular items. That will put them in a special section (your Starred Items) so you can go back days, months later and read a particular good post. You can also ‘Share’ items and that will place them on a page that you can send to your friends. This option is more for power users, but it is a cool one. You can actually add snippets of your ‘Shared Items’ to your blog so people can know what you have been reading. Pretty cool!

Subscribing to Other Blogs

Now, those feeds that Google suggests are great and everything but what about the stuff YOU want! Let’s get to that. Where it says ‘Add Subscription’, click on that… and this box will pop up:

Google is pretty smart and will find the RSS Feed FOR you so you don’t have to muddle through. Basically you just put in the website address of the site you want to read… I’ll use MINE as an example… and click on Add!

Eh, Voila! All the last 10 posts will filter in on the right side and the subscription will be added. At the top will be a section where you can add it to a specific folder.

I have a folder for Friends, Celebrities, SEO Stuff, News, Daily News… blah blah. As you grow, it’s nice to have things in folders. You can then read things as a ‘River of News’ instead of clicking on each specific feed.

So that is how you subscribe to blogs. Most of the BlogSpot, WordPress, etc places are really easy. Sometimes Google can’t find the feed though so you actually have to find the full Feed URL and put that in. Things are getting easier though and you just have to look for RSS Feed or Subscribe via RSS and you should be good to go.

Comment Feeds

Ahh, comments! Most of the Blogs do not have a subscribe to posts to check out the comments! Comments are what makes the blogs social. So if you make a comment, you have to go back and keep checking the site to see what funny people say. 🙂

If there is no comment feed, many times I will keep a blog post as ‘Unread’ in Google so I can click on it once a day to see what comments have been updated. I do love the Comment RSS Feeds though.

Here is a post I did awhile back about Comment Feeds. It shows you the URL paths you can subscribe too but I put them down below too.

BlogSpot (Blogger) is a bit odd. Sometimes you can subscribe via RSS and sometimes you have to subscribe to Atom. They are the same thing but just slightly different technologies. (Think of it like PC and Mac – they are competitors) So sometimes I can subscribe to the blogs comment feed and sometimes I can’t. I’m probably doing it wrong, I dunno.

On my own site, you can see at the end of each post it lets you subscribe to the post comments:

When you click on it, it trys to open something weird, blah. If you save it you can get the URL but I’ll just tell it to you. 🙂

http://kristidavis.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default
So the above URL, you would put into the ‘Add Subscription’ box and then you would be subscribed to my comments. (I don’t get a lot 🙂

To compare, this is my RSS Feed URL:
http://kristidavis.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

So if Google didn’t recognize an RSS Feed if you put in my initial website address (URL), then you would have to go hunt down my whole RSS Feed URL. And there it is. Luckily Google is smart. Whew.

So most of the people on BlogSpot (Blogger), you can subscribe to their comments and regular posts using the two URLs above. Just insert their website address instead of mine.

So here is my Google reader tonight:

Ok, you can’t see it very well.. but I have Celebrities which is empty cause I read it. My Daily SEO News which has over 100 posts in it.. Probably won’t read them all.. I’ll just end up selecting ‘Mark All As Read’ so I won’t have to see them ever again. 🙂

I can always go back to the website and read up on old entries but if my feed reader gets to bulky, I just make everything go away. 🙂

I have my Friends folder which has a post from the Bengard Family that I need to read and then I have my SEO folder. I have a few other folders but no current posts are in them so they aren’t showing up. The reason Celebrities is showing up with nothing in it is because I’m still ‘clicked’ in it after reading all the posts.

Google Reader also has a fun Trends section. I am subscribed to 134 subscriptions, and over the last 30 days I have read 3,727 items, starred 3 items, and shared 0 items. Wow! I actually used to have over 180 subscriptions but I have really been getting rid of things in the past 6 months. I think I’m pretty comfortable right now. Most of it is SEO stuff which is regurgitated by everyone so I could probably lose a few more… We shall see. It’s easy to put subscriptions in your Reader and see if anything interesting comes through after a few weeks. If it doesn’t, unsubscribe… You can always go to their website later and find stuff ‘the old way’. hehe

So, Now What?

Now that you are subscribed to your favorite blogs (and not so favorites), just bookmark your Google Reader page and every morning, go to Google Reader to see who has posted new stuff! Like I said, if you are subscribed to only a few blogs and people don’t post that often, you will probably be annoyed at coming to a blank Google Reader page. So you need to have some subscriptions that update daily or every few days so you can actually benefit from the time savings.

Happy Google Reader’ing and I hope you love your RSS Feed Reader just as much as I do! 🙂