Google Reader: My new favorite thing March 23
A couple days ago I posted about setting up my Feedburner account to help you, the loyal reader, keep tabs on my site. It does this by providing the RSS feed to my site, a feed which you can put in various applications to see the content of my site. In trying to explain RSS to people, I am finding that the best way to see how it works is to simply use it… and one of the easiest ways I have yet seen to use it is with the Google Reader. I have been using it for the past week or so, and now I’m not sure how I got by without it!
So what does the Google Reader do and why should you use it? Here is a case study (mine). Lets say there are several sites that I check on a regular basis. I like to read The Consumerist, Lifehacker, and postsecret. I could check each one individually by typing in their domain names in my address bar, or I could bookmark them all and look through my bookmarks, going to each site one by one and seeing what was new. Or (drum roll please), I could use a feed reader like Google Reader. Most sites have some sort of feed that you can subscribe to. On my site, you can see the bright orange icon in the sidebar… that is an RSS Feed subscription icon. When you click on it, your browser should ask you where you want to subscribe to the feed, and Google Reader should be one of the choices on the list. You need a Google account (easy to set up) and you are good to go!
Once you are subscribed to the feed in Google reader you will see any updates to the site on the reader home page. So now instead of going all over the net, I can go to one place and see any updates to the various sites that I read. Again, I could write about this forever and it would still be a tough concept to grasp… just try it out and you will see the magic that is RSS.
Of course that is just the beginning…once I have my feeds in Google Reader there is a lot I can do with them, even share the stories I like with you guys:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/02776214800859449102
