Friday, March 6, 2009


Google Reader


Before I discovered the joys of Google Reader, yesterday, I either manually typed in all the sites I visited, or I had a Windows batch file that ran consecutive instances of Internet Explorer, launching one site after another. Prohibitively time-consuming for me and virtual memory crashing for my nine-year-old computer.

"Google Reader is a tool for gathering, reading, and sharing all the blogs and websites you read on the web." If you follow more than one or two blogs, this is the best way to organize them. At a glance, I can tell which sites were updated since I last logged on, so I don't waste time going every day over to a blog that updates infrequently.

There's only the one-time hit of subscribing, i.e., adding, your blog feed addresses to your reader one-by-one. Then every time from any where, all you have to do is type Google Reader into the address bar, and you have access to all the blogs.

So far, the ones I haven't been able to aggregate into the Google Reader are:
1. Twitter
2. Facebook
3. LiveJournal
4. E-mail
5. Message Bulletin Boards
6. Weather

But other than that, I'm golden.

As Elizabeth Wiggs, Susan Wiggs's daughter, says in her blog Figs and Wigs, "Why didn’t I start using this earlier?"

So, Romanistas, are you fans of aggregators and blog readers? If so, which one(s) do you use? If you've never tried one before, would you be willing to give it a go after reading this post?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am partial to the WAX AGGREGATE FEED! Ours! If you go to the WaxBlog http://www.waxcreative.com/blog and you look in the sidebar, there is a list entitled: Connect with Our Blogging Clients. This is an aggregate of about two dozen (and growing) bloggers from the Waxcreative rolls. If they update, our feed updates -- ALL THE TIME! So if you check the WaxBlog every day, you can see this change ALL THE TIME... Jane Porter, Elizabeth Boyle, Susanna Carr, Hope Tarr, many more, and a few non-romance authors, too.

Sorry about the shameless self-promotion, but it's such a cool thing (all Abi, of course, of course)!

Keira Soleore said...

Your blog feeder's totally speeshul. It's Abi-Speeshul that makes it even better. I was thrilled when it showed up not too long ago. It's especially fun when folks like Jane Porter updates nearly every day.

I wish Abi would write one on a bigger scale that will let you see the entire blog, read the comments, and also write comments. She could sell it to Google for millions and then retire, er, still work for you. :)