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Guest Post by Carla Ganiel

In my last post I mentioned that I subscribe to over a hundred blogs. How do I manage all that information without getting overwhelmed? And how do you “subscribe” to a blog, anyway?

When I first started reading blogs, I used to bookmark them the way you would any other website you wanted to return to, but eventually that got to be too much. I found myself checking my favorite blogs several times a day to see if any new content had been posted, while some blogs I forgot to check for weeks at a time. Clearly, the more blogs I tried to keep track of, the less efficient my bookmark approach became.

Then I discovered RSS, short for “Really Simple Syndication,” a tool that lets you know whenever a blog or other website has been updated. Once again, Darren Rowse at Problogger provides an extremely clear and thorough explanation of how this works. To put it simply, blogs publish a feed, to which you can subscribe. Darren writes, “It’s like subscribing to a magazine that is delivered to you periodically but instead of it coming in your physical mail box each month when the magazine is published it is delivered to your ‘RSS Reader’ every time your favorite website updates.”

Darren recommends two free RSS readers for beginners, Google Reader and Bloglines. I use Google Reader and have found it very user friendly. I have it set up as my homepage so that whenever I turn on my computer the first thing I see is a list of new blog posts that have been published by all the blogs to which I subscribe. I don’t read every single post from every single blog subscription. Instead, with Google Reader, I can scan through them quickly, reading the headlines and deciding how to manage the content.

If the headline doesn’t grab my attention, I might just delete the post. If I’m interested in the topic, I might skim it and then delete it. Or I might read the whole thing and visit the blog to leave a comment. If I want to share the post with my friends, I can email it to them right from Google Reader. And if I want to bookmark a particular post for future reference, I can use another great tool, del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site that lets me organize all my links online, access them from any computer in the world, and share them with my friends.

To subscribe to this blog’s feed, click on the orange RSS icon in the right-hand column. You can also subscribe to receive updates whenever comments are made by clicking on the RSS 2.0 link when you leave a comment.

This may seem like overkill if you’re new to blogging. Maybe this is the only blog you read. But blogging has a funny way of snowballing, and you may be surprised at how quickly you find yourself keeping track of more and more blogs. If that’s the case, you may be ready to try out RSS sooner than you think.

In the meantime, there’s another option to help you keep track of updates to this blog. Simply enter your email address in the box in the right-hand column and click “sign up,” and we’ll send you email updates to let you know when we’ve posted something new.

Carla Ganiel is a nonprofit management consultant from Tremont, Maine.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Blogging, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.