Just posting this to (finally) give *mad props* to Google on their recent upgrades to the fantastic Google Reader… if you don’t have a Google Reader (Gmail) account yet go get one (they are free)! If you don’t know what Google Reader is or why you should have an account I will explain.
All the blog, news and other sites with multiple posts a day often use a system called RSS (or Really Simple Syndication). For instance the RSS feed link to my site is listed at the very bottom of the page, some sites also use small graphical banners or use words such as (XML) FEED.
To use it (once you have a Google Reader account), is just copy the RSS/XML link, click Add Subscription in Google Reader. Do this for all your favorite sites (and even for their comment feeds if you care…) After you add feeds you can customize each feed’s title, tag your favorite posts and label things.
For advanced users there is a link in your goodies section of Google Reader Settings where you can you can drag a link to your bookmarks toolbar then when you browse a site and see a RSS link you want to add to your Google Reader account all you do is drag and drop the RSS link to the Subscribe Bookmark on your toolbar! You can also use Google Reader on your cellphone and other fun stuff!
Now when you login to your Google Reader account it will check all your defined sites and see if there were any new posts (or comments if you set them up) and you can read them in one easy location. If you want to comment yourself just click the little arrow and it’ll open up a new window with that post and you can comment.
Happy Reading!
The only thing that bugs me is that something is slow. I just checked, and this post hasn’t shown up in my reader yet. The other thing is that not everyone has a comments feed…so if I want to see if new comments have been posted, I still have to go to their site.
Oh well.
Reply to this
It finally showed up. Only a half an hour late. Not too bad.
Reply to this
Hit and miss… I know it doesn’t check immediatley for new posts when you click refresh (I think it’s like every 15 minutes or something like that, it’s cached for sure).
As far as comments go, if they are using wordpress they for sure have feeds for both:
/?feed=rss2
/?feed=comments-rss2
if they have htaccess enabled then you get pretty looking urls:
/feed/
/comments/feed/
if they are using blogger or some other service… yeah you may not have a comments feed.
It still beats having to visit 20 different sites a day just to check for new stuff, and it’s super useful if they are high activity sites.
Reply to this
I don’t think i posted this until about 15 minutes ago, the time is wrong on the post, that would reflect when i started writing the post initially.
Reply to this