Steve Piccolo's Blog

You can read a blog in many ways. The simplest is to open your Internet browser (FireFox or Internet Explorer) and visit the blog Web site. However, if want to stay up on many blogs, it can be tedious to always browse to many different sites.

Another way to stay up-to-date is via email. For example, at the bottom of my blog, there’s a box where you can enter your email address to receive a notification each time I post something new to my blog.

Blogs can also be accessed as a feed. A feed is a blog formatted in a way only computers (and geeky people like me) can understand. You can then use a blog reader to subscribe to lots of blogs. Whenever someone posts something new, your blog reader will read the feed and display the new information to you.

Nowadays a ton of Web sites (that are not necessarily blogs) also have feeds. They’re often called RSS, Atom, or XML feeds. They enable you to use a blog reader to stay caught up on these sites without having to visit each Web site. You can identify a feed by images such as the ones below. Usually you just click on that link and then use that Web address in your blog reader.

There are many ways to read blogs. Here are four popular ways:

• Google’s Personalized Home Page. To use it, you must create a Google account. You can then customize it so every time you visit Google it will show the information to which you’ve subscribed. To add a blog feed, click on the Add Content link in the top left; next to the search box at the top, click on Add by Url; in the box, enter the feed address and click Add.
• BlogLines or Google Reader. You can add a bunch of feeds to it and view them on a single Web page. It’s a little easier to use than the Personalized Home page but not quite as accessible.
• The Live Bookmarks feature in the Firefox web browser. Even if you don’t use this feature, you really should download Firefox
• FeedDemon. This is a separate program you install on your computer. It has a very nice interface and is the best way I’ve found to read blogs. But it does cost $29.95.

Posted on July 29th, 2006 under Uncategorized • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback