How I Read 100′s Of Blogs In Minutes Each Day

First a little bit about what a feed reader is and what RSS means.

A feed reader is a bit of online (or offline) software that pulls in an xml document and displays it for you in a browser. It gives you the opportunity to organize the information into easy to read and locate folders.

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is the process of taking information from a website (generally from a database) and pulling it into a single document that is standardized for all feed readers to understand the information.

Basically it works for me like this:

I visit a website, a blog or some other form of a web page that has an RSS feed associated with it. I use the Firefox browser so in the address bar on the far right I see a small icon that tells me there is an RSS feed available. When I want to add that feed in my feed reader, I click on the little icon and it opens up a web page that allows me to approve adding this feed into my account.

I use the Google reader for several reasons, the main one being that I can access my feeds from any computer anywhere simply by logging into my Google account.

Now in my reader I have set up folders which represent my interests. For instance I have my feeds setup like this:

• *Favs = the star keeps this folder at the top, and favs is short for my favorite reads. This folder gets my attention first.
• Art = All of the art related blogs, websites and news sites I love.
• Art – Local = Local artists who I may know or want to follow their careers or blogs. This includes local galleries who have feeds.
• Design-Style = Not specifically art related but inspirational visually and relating to home design and fashion.
• FB Art = Artists, galleries and other art related pages from facebook.
• FB Biz = Businesses I follow on facebook that are not directly art related.
• Good Reads = Blogs, columnists and other interesting people who write things that I really enjoy reading. Very eclectic mix.
• Money = Of course
• Video = Feeds from my YouTube subscriptions, I should add a star to this one it is the second folder I always look at.

How this helps me…

I have in the past followed upwards of 500 blogs and many websites. It became a huge black hole of my time, click to each one of them to see what might be new. Eventually I only managed to visit a few a day. Many of them I didn’t get to for days and days. I missed a lot of really great content that way.

Nowadays, when I open Google Reader I see my folders with numbers beside them. What the numbers tell me is how many new posts are available for me to read. And if I click on the folder name it automatically shows me the new posts. What this means for me is instead of going and visiting 100 different blogs to see if there are any new posts, my reader does this for me.

With my reader all of that work is done for me.

Because I use the Firefox browser I have installed a plug-in that runs in the lower right corner of my browser that does a couple of things for me. 1) It tells me how many new posts are available in my reader folders. 2) I can click on it and it brings up my reader for me. 3) If I right click on it at any time it tells me what blog or website has a post available.

I hope this explains what a reader is, what rss is for and how I use it to save myself time and still be up to date with what is happening on my favorite blogs and websites.