If you see JINXIDORU written in big block letters above this post and a blue bar above that, it means that you're probably not reading my blog in the way the 21st century intended you to read it. Here's the problem. If you're anything like me (for your sake, I hope the answer is no), you have a lot of friends with blogs. As each month passes more of your friends start creating blogs and encouraging you to read them. In fact, they probably ask you every time they see you whether you've read their most recent post about their childhood pet. But, you have no interest in checking for new blog posts every day to all fifty of your friends, especially when most of the blogs are like this one where the owner only posts once every other week. So, how is one to keep up to date on blogs without checking fifty sites every time you open your browser?
Well, fortunately, the internet gods have provided us a solution, and it is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). The simplest explanation is that RSS provides a system wherein your computer periodically (usually once an hour) checks if a site has updated. If the site has updated since the last check, then the user is notified. Using RSS, one needs not constantly check if their are new posts. Your computer also keeps track of what posts you have read and which you have not. So, you can wait to read someone's posts until the perfect opportunity.
So, how do you use RSS? First you will need an aggregator. An aggregator is the program which takes individual RSS feeds and combines them (or aggregates) so the user can see which have updated and so on. There are many aggregators available, some for cost, most for free. With the number and quality of free aggregators, there is no reason to pay for one. In fact, Firefox and IE7 provide a mechanism for placing RSS feeds as bookmarks. When you expand the bookmark, it expands to the most recent 5 or 10 posts on the site.
While there are a lot of options, in my opinion the very best aggregator is Google Reader. Google Reader has a lot of great options and can be accessed from anywhere in the world. They even have an iPhone interface so that you can check people's blogs very easily from your iPhone. It's just plain a great product, and it's free.
So, let's setup a Google Reader account. Go to the Google Reader site and create an account. You can login directly if you have a gmail account or any Google account for that matter (blogger, analytics, personalized home page, etc...). Once you are in the program, you will see a dark blue link on the left with a big blue plus sign that reads "Add Subscription". Click that link, and you will be prompted for a feed URL. Go ahead and enter the address for a blog you read, for example "http://jinxidoru.blogspot.com". This will add the feed for the given blog to your feed list. If you now click the link at the top left that reads "All items", you will see a list of the most recent entries from the given blog. Click on any of these posts to read the post directly within Google Reader. Here is one of the great things about Google Reader, you can read the blogs without even going to the blog. Notice that once you've clicked on a post, it highlights to indicate that it has been read.
Google Reader has tons of great options. I'll give you a few, because I'm sure you can search out many others on your own. If you especially like a blog post or for some reason want to go back to it (say you didn't finish reading it), you can click the star next to a title. This will place the specific post in your Starred Items list. You can see all of the posts you've starred by clicking "Starred items" on the upper left.
Once you get a number of blogs, you can categorize them. This allows you to check specific types of blogs separately. The main reason I do this is because I use Google Reader to read the news. Most news sites provide RSS feeds. In fact, blogs were not the original intended purpose of RSS feeds, it was more for news sites. You can subscribe to CNN's news feed and you will see stories come across as they become available on CNN. But, as I'm sure you can imagine, CNN produces new stories much quicker than this blog, for example. And, while you probably want to read every single word that I write (and ponder it deeply, but ultimately accepting my opinions 100%), you probably won't read every CNN story. So the best thing to do is keep them separate. Create a tag for news and another tag for blogs. This way all of the new stories in your news feeds won't clutter your list of blog posts. This can be done by clicking "Settings", located at the very-top right of the screen then selected the "Subscriptions" tab on the following page. You can change the folders to which a blog belongs by selecting the correct folder in the drop-down list.
Alternatively to adding subscriptions through the "Add Subscription" link, you can add subscriptions with most modern browsers in an even easier way. If you visit a site with an RSS feed (like this one for example) there will be a little RSS icon on the address bar. It looks like the imagine posted to the left. Check in your address bar right now, there should be one if you are using Firefox. IE7 does something similar, I'm pretty sure. If you click it, there are a number of options which allow you to subscribe immediately.
One last option is for Google Reader users who also use Google's personalized home page. You can add a Google Reader widget your personalized home page. Then every time you start up your browser you will see who has updated their blog.
Well, I hope this has been helpful in some way. If anyone has any questions or needs help setting this up, let me know. I would be more than happy to assist. I really do encourage everyone to start using this. It has saved me a lot of time and helped me keep up-to-date much better with my friends' blogs.
