RSS Feeds For Dummies

If you are new to blogging you may be thinking that it is really cool to read everyone's blogs, but you get sick and tired of clicking through 10 people's blogs to find out only 2 of them have put up any new posts since last time you looked (I'll refrain from naming names here).

There are a couple of different solutions to this problem and they all have to do with RSS feeds. All blogs (and lots of other sites (like news sites)) provide an RSS feed which basically gives other programs a standard way to read that site and tell when things were posted so that it can pull content together from many different sites. Instead of clicking on lots of links every time you want to see what is new on everyone's blogs, you can get an RSS reader set up with just the sites you care about and go to one place to see everything that's new. Its like checking your email except that instead of emails, it has blog posts. Easy.

Since Google is the best at everything, I'm going to recommend Google Reader (all you need is a google identity and you can get set up in about 5 minutes), but other sites have their versions of the same thing. Here is a very short video explaining the idea and how to use google reader:



For a video walking you through a couple of more options, try clicking on this:
Google Reader Tutorial by Andy Wibbels

Just like any program, there are a bunch of different options and views. Once you subscribe to your favorite blogs, you'll have to play around with it for a few minutes to get it to display the way you want, but it is a million times better than clicking all the links (unless you are Marv and like clicking on lots of links). You can ask questions in the comments if you have problems and we will read your questions and laugh.