…but I want to know if any of you knows how to subscribe to a blog feed, and exactly what that means.
I suspect - though I could just be imagining my perfect little world - that there’s some mechanism out there that tells folks when there are new posts to their favorite blogs. I spend a fair amount of time checking in on my favorites, but they don’t always have new posts up, so it’s essentially time that I’m burning for nothing (this is where I was worrying that you’d all think I was being passive-aggressive. YES, I want new content from you more regularly, but that’s not really what I’m after today). I’d love for those blogs to tell me when their authors have posted new content so I can stop pathetically clicking on the sites and artificially inflating hit numbers.
I’ve noticed that there are a couple of you (I’m not naming names; you know who you are) who comment on posts almost as soon as I’ve hit the damned “publish” button. This means either A) you, too, spend entirely too much time at your computer scrolling through your blog bookmarks or B) you’ve got some secret detection device that tells you when I’ve put something new up on the site. If the former is the case, I’m sorry. Perhaps we should start a little support group, you and I. If it’s the latter, can you clue me in, please? I want in on that grand technology.
I use Google reader. I’m not sure how the RSS feed things work. And, yes…I spend entirely too much time surfing the net
What does this mean, “Google reader”? Does this tell you when I have new posts?
http://www.bloglines.com/ does this I think - I spent some time subscribing to blogs, but now just do the click my bookmarks!
I use Bloglines. :-). I also use Newsgator as a back-up (just in case Bloglines has downtime) but it’s quite slow (I’m a dial-up user, so it might be better for broadband users).
I have a ’subscribe to Bloglines button’ in my toolbar (might only work on Firefox but I can’t remember), so when I come across a site I like, including news sites, I make sure I’m on the home page of that blog and then click on the ’sub to Bloglines’ button. It brings up a page with suggested feeds for that blog, and I pick one (any). It then squirrels it away into my Bloglines account. Every time I cast my eye down the list in Bloglines, it shows me which ones have new posts, and how many new posts it has.
In theory it saves a lot of time, but then again, when you have collected a lot of blogs, and lots of them have updated, you can be reading all morning! Better than going through the bookmarks and finding they’ve not updated yet, I guess…
Google Reader here. Go too http://www.google.com and create an account. Then find the google reader thing and start adding blogs.
I LOVE it. I figured out how to use it on my own so i know you can do it too. Saves me lots of clicking to see what’s new.
It does tell me when you have new posts. There are a few blogs that won’t let you add them to your google reader, but they are few.
Meno beat me to it. Thanks, Meno.
I haven’t had any blogs it doesn’t update, though some are faster than others.
Google reader for me, too. It’s really awesome. It’s particularly convenient for my student lifestyle, where I’m using 4 different computers to check blogs and would otherwise have to remember all the addresses.