how_totrack_updates.htm

After a while everyone, has a list of favourite blogs they read on a regular basis. Once the list gets past a very small number, the time taken to check each one then move to the next just becomes too much.

There is an easy way to see when a blog has updated - its called an Feed Reader.

Here’s roughly how it works:

When-ever a blog is updated, it also updates a special file called its feed. You can see the one for this blog by clicking the orange square in the top right corner of this page (where is says “subscribe”). As you can see the feed is just a summary of the latest blog entries.
There are applications (called feed readers) which will monitor the feeds of blogs. They will only display the updates to those feeds. So this means when you log-in to your favorite feed reader you are presented only with updates from the blogs you follow.
I track about 30 blogs and a few forums. A feed reader allows me to scan through the new posts every day (20 - 60), read the posts I want and mark the ones I want to come back to. It takes only about 10 - 15 minutes.

Using a feed reader saves me a heap of time each day.

If you are interested in setting yourself up with a feed reader, here are a few notes to get started

1. Signup For A Free Reader

For this blog the 3 most popular readers are: Google Reader - Most popular by far Bloglines - One of the longest running readers on the net MyYahoo - Yahoo’s personal feed reader Having used all three, the Google Reader is my personal favorite, however any of the three do a good job.

Browse to a blog you like and look for an orange square either on the website itself or in the URL line of your browser.

3. Right click the orange square and select “copy shortcut” - IE or “Copy link location” - Firefox, this will place the link to the feed into your clipboard.

4. Login to your feed reader and paste the clipboard location into the “new feed” section of the reader.

Thats it - now whenever you check your feed reader and a new post has been made, it will be displayed for you. You can track postings in forums using the same method.

There also short cuts:

Some pages show links to their feeds, which will automatically add the feed to the reader for you.
Some feeds, when you simply left click on the orange icon, will display the feed and let you select which reader to automatically add a subscription to.
The best way to get the idea of how it works is to sign-up for a free reader, then just add a few feeds and see how it goes.

You can use this blog to test your new reader if you like :-)