Feeds and Google Reader

Grain Fed?

What the hell are they talking about?

“Really Simple Syndication or RSS”

You may want to know this to use it, or you may want to just “get the gist” of what it means.

A feed is simply like getting skinny version of a big fat website delivered to you, instead of you visiting it.

It is a web entry that likely has this wee symbol near it.

It is smashed together to be easy to syndicate ( which really means to share).

Stripping the blah blahs:

You come across a Web site that has news, or regular posts (like this blog).  You want to read those frequently, but you come across about 185 other sites that you also want to follow.  Yikes.  So much for work, showering or doing laundry.

So you “subscribe” to those feeds…but you say, to where do they go?  Aha.  Until a few months ago, I didn’t know myself - and have now become a convert to a Google application called READER.*

Go to the “more” button on your Google home page.  Click on “Reader.”  You will need to create a Google password if you don’t have one (and you don’t have to have a Gmail account - you can use your own email address).

Then go to the “add subscription” button to add a feed from Google (a list of choices will then appear well, since Google is Google) OR you can click on that button above on your favorite web sites and those feeds will appear in your Reader.

Think of it like a dedicated email in-box just for the stuff you want to read (not spam or emails from your mother-in-law assigning you a dish for the family dinner).

What do I feed?

I susbcribe to a variety of good friends’ blogs like Jessica Hagy’s great Venn-diagram mind-games to my alter-ego web analytics partner Dave Culbertson, as well as general national news sites like Wall Street Journal and journalist/bloggers like David Pogue from the New York Times.  I get a recipe feed, and also some kid-centric stuff.  While I’m a mom and now a blogger, I don’t consider myself a mommy blogger - those women have about 250 feeds of other moms blogging about lord knows what.  I’m sure I’ll revisit the mommy blogger culture in a later post.

Just remember FEED means EASY READ.

* Because this blog is my opinion, I will choose the application that I have used and like best.  In this case, there are at least 2 dozen other legitimate “readers” out there from Yahoo and the like, but the intent is to NOT overwhelm you with lists and more well, blah-blahs.