Monday, February 13, 2006

keeping up with the joneses

Ok, so I know that its probably old hat by now and that most of my readers know about this but I still like using this tool. From the folks that brought you GMail and Google Earth comes ... Google Reader.

Trying to keep up with all the blogs that I try to read, I find it frustrating to go to certain websites day after day and seeing nothing new. Don't get me wrong, I totally understand that there are days/weeks when you don't have the time to update - I know EXACTLY how that feels. So rather than going to the blog day after day and waiting for the update, let the new entry come to you.

As many of you are well aware, there is a lovely idea out there and it has to do with live feeds. Its this fandangled thing called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it is tied together with XML (Extensible Markup Language). None of that is terribly important to what Google Reader is all about and Acid Zebra can be asked about all of the particulars that I don't know.

What I do know is that Google Reader brings my blogs (and other RSS feeds) right to me, no need to surf around to all the websites anymore. I log in to my Google account, go to the Reader (click on title above) and poof! there are my feeds. If any of them have been updated, the new entry is there for me to read. If nothing new, nothing new is shown. If you want to go back to read old posts, you can do that too. If you want to see the original, the link is provided for easy navigation so you can go to the website. All there, nice and easy.

And isn't that what technology is supposed to do?

1 comment:

Acid Zebra said...

yeah, if you want to keep track of other people's activities on the web a feed reader is one of the basic tools you need.

look into cocomment (http://www.cocomment.com/) for the next step: tracking your conversations. (sign up, wait for invitation, use it)

And if you think I'm doing more tech support you must be loco, I always tell people to RTFM at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file_format%29

:P