The best way to keep up with your favorite blogs

Do you ever wonder, as you’re visiting around to your favorite blogs to see if there are new posts up, if there might be a better, more efficient way to keep up with them? There is. It’s called a Feed Reader. Each blog has what’s called an RSS feed and you can subscribe to the blog’s feed and have new posts delivered to you, instead of you going around, wasting your valuable time, just checking to see if there are new posts. I converted to using Google Reader several months ago, and I’ve never looked back. I still might visit the actual blog now and then to comment on a post, but for the most part, I can enjoy their post and pictures without ever having to leave my feed reader.

If you’d like a more detailed explanation of how this works, watch this video that explains what RSS and feed readers are in plain English.

Ready to give it a try? If you don’t care for it, you can always switch back to the old, time consuming way. Okay – there are multiple feed readers out there, but I’m going to recommend Google Reader because it works great and lots of us already have Google accounts. If you don’t, it’s easy to sign up. Here is the link to Google Reader to get started. Once you’ve signed up, just click on Add Subscription towards the middle on the left. Paste the blog URL address that you want to subscribe to in the blank and voila! You are subscribed. Almost all sites have RSS feeds these days, so you can even subscribe to your favorite news source, etc. When you’re on a site, after you’ve signed up with Google Reader, and you decide you’d like to subscribe, you can just click on the little RSS icon (like the one in my navigation bar at the top) and it will add it to your reader. (you won’t see this on a lot of the blogspot blogs- subscribe directly through the reader instead) You can also just click on the Subscribe button on your Google Toolbar if you have that installed. It will only appear on sites that have an RSS feed available.

Each time you want to check to see if there are new posts on your favorite blogs, all you have to do is long into Google Reader and if there is a new post, you will see it listed. Give it a try. I currently have 2 subscribers to this blog, and one of them is me! Let’s see if I can get that up to 10 or 15. I have 75 subscribers to my professional site, 32 subscribers to Printables4Scrapbooking, and 116 are subscribed to FreeStuff4Kids!

Please let me know if you try this and have any problems at all. I’d be glad to help. You can either e-mail me at randa [at] randaclay [dot] com or leave a comment here and I will respond to it.

P.S. If you have a blogspot blog, you should consider turning on the feed option. Go to your Dashboard, then click on Settings, and then click on Site Feed, and choose “Full” in the Allow Blog Feed dropdown menu.  If you choose Short, it’s just annoying because it only sends a partial post to the reader.