How to Keep Up With Your Favorite Blogs
How To Keep Up With Your Favorite Blogs
I’m continuing my serious on tools for writers this week. If you are reading this blog post, it’s safe to say, you obviously read and like to consume information online via blogs. Reading blogs can be time-consuming. The best way to keep up with your favorite blogs is to gather the RSS feeds in one central location.
When I mention RSS feeds to some people, their first reaction is What is an RSS feed? Well, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. There are different types of feeds, but RSS is the most popular. If you manage a blog or platform (audio, video) that is updated frequently, the RSS feed provides a quick way for your visitors to subscribe to your content.
So, if you have a number of blogs you like to read and keep up with you can view the content through an aggregator. Okay, what is that? Wikipedia explains, “a feed aggregator, also known as a feed reader, news reader or simply aggregator, is client software or a Web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing.” Basically, aggregators saves the reader time. We all can use some time-savers, right?
My favorite aggregator is Google Reader. I have a definite obsession with Google. Doesn’t everybody? During a designated time of the day, I scan blog post titles. I will read the entire post if I have time or “star” the post to read later. Many times, I will “Mark All as Read” for the ones I’m not really interested in ever reading .
Being the organizational geek that I am, I make good use of the categories or what Google Reader calls “labels”. For example, I have a label called Literary Blogs. Below are a few of the blogs I have included under this label:reason or another.
AnjuelleFloyd.com- BookEnds, LLC — A Literary Agency
- Christian Fiction Blog
- MediaBistro.com
- MichaelHyatt.com
- NovelRocket.com
- RachelGardner.com
Alternative Ways to Receive RSS Feeds
While I like using Google Reader, there are many ways to subscribe to an RSS Feed.
- Email. Email is still the most popular form of electronic communication and some individuals prefer to read RSS feeds in their inbox. Popular places that send feeds via email are feedblitz.com and feedburner.com. If you check closely, some of your favorite bloggers use these sources.
- Twitter. I have my blog set-up to automatically to post a tweet when I publish a blog post. My Twitter followers can see my blog posts in the timeline immediately after they are published. If you are a blogger, I highly recommend using a service like Twitterfeed.com or Hootsuite.com.
- Facebook - I don’t care for many of the FB apps, but I highly recommend using Networked Blogs app. Since you are probably hanging out each day on Facebook, it makes sense to make this a central location to read blogs. If you are a blogger, I show you How to Connect Facebook to Your Blog on the Tywebbin Creations Blog.
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I’ve since started using the NewsGator plugin with Outlook 2007. I not sure I’m thrilled with it’s performance. I like the user-friendly interface but I subscribe to over 30 RSS feeds, and it seems to bog down the overall performance of Outlook. Granted I have five different email accounts all dumping into Outlook, so a send and receive takes a while anyway.
So, I’ve been thinking about switching over to Google Reader too.