Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Jumping on the Blog bandwagon + How to subcribe to blogs and rss feed readers.

For years I've been hearing a lot of talk about blogs. At first I didn't think much of it, assuming that "blogging" was just a way to keep a public journal. Over time I began noticing more and more awesome blogs here on blogspot, live journal and typepad. These weren't limited to my imagined "private diary" style writings either, many people were using them to spread cool news, links to things around the net, their photography and art galleries and sometimes as a replacement for a personal website altogether.

After gathering quite a few bookmarks it started to be a huge task to check all these individual blogs for updates. Recently a friend told me about google reader (learn more about that here: http://www.google.com/reader ) As many of you probably already know (I think I'm late catching on) the google reader is one of a few RSS Feed readers you can use to check all your favorite site's updates on one easy page.

Basically when you go to a website you often visit looking for updates, you may see a button that says "subscribe", "rss", or at the bottom of most blogs "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)." When you click that subscribe link there is usually an option to choose which reader you'd like to view it in (I have experience with google, so thats what I choose.) Then when you go to your google reader page you'll see a
stream of all the newest entries from every website you've added to your list! That's it, one convenient page instead of surfing each individual website looking for news.

I realized that this would be the perfect solution for website updates as well. I could just make a blog post each time I added new art, rubber stamps or flexible molds to my sites. The people interested in RSS Feed news readers could automatically see the newest things. Also, for those people who just want to bookmark my blog and come visit the old fashion way, you can see the newest entries instead of browsing through the many pages of my site looking for the new products!