Sunday, April 1, 2007

Track new blog posts with Google Reader

Google has a fabulous new tool - go to http://labs.google.com/ and click Google Reader. There's a short tutorial, after which you spend a few minutes trying to figure out how to add blogs. Then it becomes easy.
(1) At the bottom of the "Browse" page, go to the area called "Search and browse".
(2) Just paste the URL of the blog into the field, and then click Search for feeds.
(3) When you see the right results, click Subscribe.

If you have the customized Google home page (requires a Gmail address), you can add a Google Reader gadget to your home page. Then you can see all the new posts to the blogs that interest you without having to visit each one individually.

Thank Google! ;D

5 comments:

Ruzter said...

I think the idea of a reader is great. I just don't know if I am managing it correctly as I find it more work than just putting all the links in a folder and choosing "open all in tabs". I am on firefox though...

Ruzter said...

Also notice you can subscribe to this blog, link at the very bottom of the blog page

Fraz said...

Yeah, I don't know if the Firefox element would make a difference or not. I don't know what "Open all in tabs" means - mine are listed in "List view" with the newest unread post at the top. It's the Google home page blog reader gadget that has me more excited, since I can see at a glance when someone has posted something new, and the posts don't clutter up my e-mail inbox (I prefer to keep blog posts separate). They're still working on the interface, thank goodness, because it isn't immediately obvious how to set it up. I may send them a suggestion or two.

Ruzter said...

"open all in tabs" is a feature of firefox. if in your favourites you have a folder of links, you can open them all at the same time, each on a new tab in the firefox browser. I have come to live by this feature.

Fraz said...

I think IE 2007 has that as well. Takes some getting used to by us old farts.