If you look at the bottom of any post in reader, you’ll see a bunch of links: “Add Star,” “Like,” “Share,” “Share with note,” “Email,” “Keep Unread,” and “Add Tags.” “Preview” is only there because I use a program called Better GReader for some added functionality. This means that if you think your mom will like a post, you can email it to her without even leaving Google Reader. One of the coolest features of Google Reader is the ability to share a post with any of your Google Contacts. Just look for the icon on any page you’re reading and you’ll know if it’s an option.īonus features (A little on the advanced side): You can subscribe to Roger Ebert or my personal favorite, Peter Travers. Synctwofolders review movie#I keep track of my movie reviews this way. You can also subscribe to specific columns, like sports or fashion, or specific contributors a lot of the time. I suggest starting with any family or friends’ blogs and moving on to news sites or even, like the New York Times or CNN or BBC, or even ESPN. If you see an icon next to the address that looks like a soundwave, you can subscribe and all updates will come to your reader (it’s the icon next to the star in the screenshot below). To find out if a site is subscribable or not, check the address bar. This can be found in the “Goodies” tab of your settings. Add whatever site you want to your reader using the “Add Subscription” button, or you can create a bookmark to add any site you’re viewing that will go in your toolbar. I prefer to sort by oldest and cycle through the posts using the “Next Item” button. “Oldest” puts the oldest posts at the top, “Newest” starts with the newest. You can then sort them by oldest or newest by clicking on “View Settings” (“Feed Settings” when in a specific subscription). To do this, click on “All Items” and you’ll see all the posts from all your websites. To go back to the old view, click “Expanded.”Īs you add more subscriptions, you may prefer to read through all your websites in the order they posted. To do this, click on “List” in the upper-right corner of the blue box. I prefer seeing my sites as a list, and using the “Previous Item” and “Next Item” buttons to scroll through them. You can customize the way you see each feed by clicking on the “Settings” link. Click on it.Ĭongratulations, you are now reading The Mighty AfroWhitey from your very own Google Reader. You’ll notice “The Mighty AfroWhitey” shows up under the “Subscriptions” tab. Click “Add a Subscription,” then enter in the address of any website. The first thing you’ll want to do is add your favorite websites. There’s even a video to walk you through some of it. Go ahead and read them for a quick overview of what I’m about to talk about. Google put some helpful tips in your feed to get you started. After logging in, you’ll be brought to this screen: If you use GMail or any other Google service, you already have an account and you should use that one, for reasons I’ll explain later. Go to the Google Reader homepage here, and either use your existing Google Account to log in, or register for a new one. Getting started is as simple as logging in. You go to one place and your websites come to you. Why should it be any different with the websites you frequent? Google Reader makes that happen. You don’t go to a hundred different sites to get messages from your hundreds of accounts, you go to one email account and let the messages come to you. It’s a lot like having an email account for your blogs. You just go to your Google Reader and wait for the post to show up. Google Reader takes the “RSS feeds” (or more simply, the constantly updated content) from your favorite blogs or news sites and constantly checks them for updates, so you don’t have to go to little Billy’s model rocket page 5 times a day just to see his latest launch. RSS (most commonly translated as “Really Simple Syndication” but sometimes “Rich Site Summary”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works-such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video-in a standardized format. Put more simply, Google Reader is a tool used to put all the blogs you check regularly in one central location. Google Reader is an RSS-based subscription service and manager. Feel free, as always, to leave questions in the comments below, or on Twitter or Facebook. What follows is my attempt to de-mystify Google Reader, using more familiar language. The idea of an RSS subscription manager, or reader is foreign to most internet users, but it can be very helpful, especially for mothers and estranged friends and family trying to keep up with the blogs of loved ones. Google Reader announced some new features yesterday, so I thought I’d continue the Google theme of my blog lately by breaking it down for the uninitiated.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |