RSS has changed my life!
I didn’t know what I was missing otherwise I would have done this ages ago.
I really could not picture in my head how RSS feeds worked (I know, I know, I’m into all this techy stuff and didn’t get that!) and didn’t want to have to remember to go to some webpage regularly to check to see if people had updated their blogs. I mean, that’s as bad as having to remember to visit their blogs anyway. That’s why I’ve always been in favour of email subscriptions and using Feedburner for that. Besides, it’s nice being able to see the number of subscribers too from the blogger’s side of things.
Anyway, I finally decided to start exploring this RSS thing as so many other bloggers kept referring to it and after posting a question at LinkedIn Answers and also at Aussie Blogger’s forum to find out about different readers I decided to give Google Reader a go.
Why? Because the percentage of people ‘voting’ for it was way above the other suggestions and I also already had a Google account (who doesn’t?). Plus some of the readers mean having to install software on your computer but with a reader like Google Reader, you can literally log into it from any computer anywhere – it doesn’t have to travel with me. So, I was sold!
Anyway, after seeing what I could do with it, I was hooked. I mean I started off with just a couple of blogs but now have 30 on the list. I’ve heard of some with over 100. I know my number will grow too – it’s early days yet…
I love that I can leave my browser open all day and see in the Google Reader tab (I use Firefox) that there are new posts waiting to be read as a number in brackets appear. The tempation to go and read is something I have to learn to control 
but it means when I want a break from my work or read something over a cuppa, I can go to my reader to do that. Also first thing in the morning and last thing at night I can catch up with reading.
I now can keep up with things as they happen and not learn about them much later on. Whilst I was using Google Alert, that only works for phrases and keywords I’ve registered and not everything else, and I wasn’t subscribed to lots of blogs as I get heaps of email now and just hadn’t wanted to increase it further.
Of those blogs I was subscribed to by email I now have on the Reader and I know as soon as something has been published so get to read it before the email subscription even goes out. It also means I’m inclined to comment more often and I have already noticed a distinct rise in the number of visits to my own blogs directly from some of those blogs, so it’s working!
As an aside, I love that Firefox will allow you to save multiple pages for your home page, so now Google Reader is one of my home pages and it automatically opens to it whenever I start up or restart my computer.
I too am a recent convert to RSS – in fact I blogged about it yesterday!
You have such knowledge and I appreciate your readiness to share what you know with your readers. I’m newer still to blogging than you, so I’ve got a lot to learn. Thanks for keeping me up on the latest!
Thanks for mentioning feedburner. I can’t get it work yet, but will keep trying.
Seems fine now, thanks.
I *love* RSS. Unfortunately I’m finding some people still want you to sign up for email updates instead. Since I don’t want to give my email out that means I’ll probably never read that blog again. I’ve found some good ones that I’d like to read on a regular basis but without an RSS feed it isn’t going to happen. I usually email the blogger to let them know that they should add a feed, but in some cases there is also no way to contact the blogger!! I’ve particularly found this on a few VA blogs!
I agree! Not all templates have the rss feed inbuilt but it doesn’t take much to set it up. I think most new bloggers, VAs or otherwise, don’t always explore fully what’s available to them and/or are afraid to change settings perhaps.
[...] you to consider using Google Reader. I was subscribed to a number via email but once I understood how RSS worked, have changed most of my subscriptions to RSS so I can view all of the blogs in one screen (if you [...]