Make blogs come to you: subscribe to them

Suppose you wanted to learn more about blogs.

You find a mention of one that interests you, for instance, Tame the Web: Libraries and Technology a Weblog by Michael Stephens. You go to the web page and read through a few posts. OK, so far not too hard. But there's info posted there almost everyday. What's the easiest way to keep up?

Make the info come to you. Yes, you can order up a subscription to that blog so that all new posts will be delivered to your desktop each time there is a new post. That process is usually called "subscribing to an RSS feed". RSS is a term that is usually described as Really Simple Syndication and it's a simple way to get that blog info delivered every day. The the trick is knowing how. Here's the secret below:

1. Sign up for a free account on a newsreader site like NewsGator.com. Look for the words "Create Account". It's a lot like signing up for a free email account. Very straightforward but tedious. Be sure to write down your username and password.

2. You may want to unselect any "starter packs" that are offered (unless you really want to receive a lot of blogs).

3. You'll be dumped into a new account and be able add a blog by using the "Add Feeds" button in the upper left of the screen. You'll get to a screen that says "There are two ways to find a feed". You'll want to click on the last tab above that. It will say "URL and IMPORT". You'll see an instruction that says "Step 1: Enter the Feed's URL". So here you copy the URL from the address bar of whatever blog you are looking at, for example http://www.tametheweb.com/. Then press "Add feed" and you're done!

4. Now when you go back into your newsreader by clicking on "Webreader" you'll see all the news from that blog.

5. You can add more blogs at any time, for example a science fiction fan's blog or a children's literature blog or whatever you like. In fact once you have your newsreader set up and open on your desktop, if you see a blog you like, it might have a "subscribe to NewsGator" button that will do all this work for you. See this at InfoIsland about two screens down on the right side.

I wondered why people would want to do this taking all this trouble to set up this kind of newsreader when you could just go to the individual websites and read whatever you wanted to.

However I see now that it saves a lot of time of typing in every website address and it keep track for you of the postings you've read so you don't have to look over them twice and think back about whether you've read it. You can read the daily news from CNN, AzCentral, ALA, and more this way. It just makes it a lot easier to stay on top of the huge volume of stuff we have available everyday.

Let me know if you have any questions about this process. It's pretty vital for learning the rest.

Happy hunting in the blogosphere!