If you spend any amount of time reading family blogs, you probably start to notice that postings tend to be erratic. They’ll go through a streak of daily updates and then suddenly lie dormant for months at a time. Some people persistently click on the site every few days only to be disappointed. I know this happens, I see the logfiles for this blog. Others simply forget about the site, never to see new posts, assuming it to be abandoned for good. There is another option though that helps you keep up to date with this blog and all the other ones you regularly visit at a single place, and if you get serious enough it can be your source for just about all of your web browsing, leading you to fresh content all the time. Yes my friends, I am talking about using an RSS Reader.
To do this, you really have two basic options. One is to use a reader on your computer. Thunderbird has one built in as an example. The other option is to use a web based reader, with Google Reader being my choice, and that of 10 other people according to the statistics. The advantage of a web based reader is you can use it on any computer or most mobile devices and have everything in sync. And it makes it easy to integrate sharing of articles to Facebook, Buzz, etc. After selecting a reader, you simply need to subscribe to some feeds. To do this with Google Reader, hit the handy subscribe button on the left hand side and enter in the url of http://www.shanehall.net/blog/ and it should auto find the feed. Or get really technical and put the feed in by hand, which is what most standalone tools will want. That address is http://shanehall.net/blog/feed/ for the blog entries themselves. If you want to see the comments in the reader also, subscribe to http://shanehall.net/blog/comments/feed/. Once you get started, you will start to notice rss or atom feed buttons on most blogs you read. Subscribe to those also. After a bit you will start to simply check your RSS reader and see the fresh content in one place without needing to poke around abandoned blogs. Every now and then you get a treat when a blog suddenly has it’s first post in 4 months pop up and you are able to comment in minutes if you are so inclined.
Any other methods people are using to keep up with blogs out there we should know about? Any questions on how to get this setup for your own use? Feel free to post comments in either case.