Google Reader
I love Google Reader (I hear “then why don’t you marry it?” inside my head … been spending way too much time with 8 year olds!). “Well maybe I will” (say’s my 8-year old self). I once said to a friend “If Thai food was a man, I’d marry it” Seriously, there is nothing better than the smell of Thai food, well, maybe chocolate. And grass after it’s been mowed, and maybe towels after they come out of the dryer, but I digress, starting over …
I love Google Reader! It’s a tool that makes life so much easier. I’ve found tons of blogs and websites that I visit from time to time, and bookmark them just like I was taught. But with time being a very precious commodity, I don’t always have the time to check in on them all.
Google Reader to the rescue! It is a great way to read all of your favorite blogs and websites in one place … think of it as a newspaper that is created just for you! You’re the publisher and you get to choose all the information and news that YOU want, delivered to your virtual “doorstep” just as soon as it’s published.
Since Google already has some good instructions posted on their site, I won’t go into the “how-to-do-it” here. Check out their help page. And if you are a more visual person, Google also offers some video tutorials that you can find on YouTube. If you are unfamiliar with readers, watch the first one and you’ll get a really good overview of how it works.
Make it Work FOR You
After you have it set up, and you’ve subscribed to some feeds, set up some categories (they call them folders) this is the part that makes life easy.
I have 4 folders right now:
- Social Technology (sites that talk about social media, tips & tools)
- News (newspapers, magazines, newsy blogs)
- Just for Fun (comics, Daily Show videos, you know, fun stuff!)
- My city (your feeds can be included in more than one folder … so, I have a newspaper that is also published in my city, I put that in both categories. I’m not sure this is working for me, so this might change, just remember you have the option.)
- Blogs (sites I read that don’t fall into those other categories)
You might need more or less. Think about it like a filing cabinet. If these were magazines or newspaper articles printed on paper, how would you file the content? Just set up your reader, your virtual filing cabinet, the same way. And remember – you aren’t locked into anything. If after a few months you want to change the way you are organizing your content, you can change your settings at any time.
Google Reader has some “pre-packaged” sites you can choose to follow to get you started. I signed up for some of these when I set up my account, but there was so much there that I didn’t want to read, that I deleted them all and started over just adding sites one-by-one as I found them.
Don’t get overwhelmed!
If you haven’t been by in a few days and you open up Google Reader and find that you have over 1,000 articles that you haven’t seen … take a deep breath and say to yourself: ”I am not required to read it all!”
Skim it! Scroll down through the items, read the titles and choose the ones you want to read and just pass by the rest.
Say it again … ”I am not required to read it all!” If you want to just read one site, you can choose which feed you’re interested in by clicking on that one in the left column. When you’ve looked at the ones you want, simply click on “Mark All As Read” and they all go away. (Remember: It’s all still there, click on “show all items” and the list will come back or you can just go to their website).
I tend to do this with the “just for fun” and “news” categories, they post a lot of stuff and if I have time, I’ll scroll through them and see what’s in the headlines. Other times, like today, there were over 1,000 in the news category, way to much to get through and the number of unread articles may as well be blinking in neon it drives me so crazy. So, bye-bye … there’ll be more to read tomorrow.
I don’t usually do this with the work related stuff. If I don’t have time to read everything I want it one sitting, I can either leave it be until the next time I log in, or check the “keep unread” box as I’m scrolling down. After I’ve scrolled through the list, the one’s I’ve by-passed will go away and the one’s I’ve checked “keep unread” will be saved for next time.
If you find that you are clicking “Mark all as read’ more often than not, don’t feel locked into your lists. If a site posts too much stuff for you to handle, or they go in a direction that you aren’t interested in anymore … simply remove them from your feed.
Most sites have button somewhere (usually at the top) where you can subscribe, but sometimes you have to hunt it down (why? I don’t know why they wouldn’t want it sitting tall and proud at the top of their site. I think it’s designers having issues with “how it looks” but I could be wrong). Check out the Google Help section to learn how to subscribe to a website or blogs feed.
Subscribing to a site saves me from having to remember ALL the places that I want check that day. It takes the pressure off me. I don’t have to go out and hunt down what I’m looking for, instead it delivers what I want, to me, when I’m ready for it … kinda like take-out. Too bad there aren’t any take out Thai food places around here, I’m hungry for some Phad-Thai.
