Snoskred - Life in the Country

If you use Google Reader and you only read one post today, make it this post because what I am about to tell you will change your way of reading blogs forever. If, like many people, you do not use a feed reader at all, make sure to read this post. There are only so many hours in a day so you have to make the most of your time.

Watch Out!

In Space a black hole is a hole in the fabric of space-time. A deep well into which matter and energy may fall but may never exit. Out there somewhere are bloggers who have fallen into these holes and never seem to find their way out again. These holes are known on earth as Feed Readers.

The Temporal Vortex -

In Space a temporal vortex is a rift in the spacetime continuum that allows people to travel from one point in time to another point in time without any time passing. On Earth, this is known as Web Surfing.

Time Goes By -

There you sit, happily reading posts in your feed reader. Something catches your attention and you click on a link, which leads you to another link, which leads you somewhere else. Before you know it, two hours have passed and you are left wondering - where did that time go?

Never Fear -

Because Snoskred is here, and I have a plan which will help you -

- read more blogs more efficiently
- make better use of your time
- show you some neat features in Google Reader which are very useful and time saving.

First Up -

Feed Reading For Beginners

This is for people who still surf manually to blogs or use bookmarks. If you are already using a feed reader you may want to scroll down till you see STOP in bright red. Just to save yourself a little time.

Why Do I Need To Use One?

How many times do you visit a site and they have not posted anything new? That’s time (and internet bandwidth) wasted, right there. Wouldn’t it be great if there was some way that people could slap you in the face with a wet newspaper when they’ve written a new post? Imagine if some genius invented such a thing! Well, someone did. It’s called a feed reader.

What You Talkin’ Bout?

Don’t worry, I’m not going to get too technical on you. Every blog you visit has a RSS feed - RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is well named, because it is really simple. It means you can “subscribe” to a blog. Whenever that blog updates, you will see the new posts in your feed reader. This means you can stop wasting time visiting sites only to find nothing has been written.

How Fast?

Generally a new post will appear between 30 minutes to 6 hours of being posted by the blogger. Bloggers can make this quicker by “pinging” and using a service called Feedburner, which we have discussed before and I will link to those discussions at the end of the post.

How Do I Get A Feed Reader?

There are many free feed reader services out there. Bloglines and Google Reader are the two most popular. I use Google Reader so that is the one we will talk about today. All you need to get yourself a Google Reader is a Google account, which you may already have if you use a Gmail address - or if you use Blogger.

How Do I Add My Blogs To It?

There are two ways of adding a blog to your feedreader. 1. If the blogger involved has the universal feed symbol on their blog, you can click on that. You will usually then be asked what kind of feed reader you want to use, and then you will be asked to confirm your subscription by simply clicking on “Add To Google Reader”. 2. Simply click on “Add Subscription” in Google Reader and enter the blog URL into the box you see below. The reader will then find the feed for that blog.

STOP

Bloggers - Two Questions

Do you have the universal RSS symbol at the top of your sidebar? If you do not, I highly recommend you put one there - you will gain more subscribers if you make it easy and simple for them to subscribe. See this post of Sephy’s - All About RSS - for info on how to do that.

Do you have a feedburner feed? If not, you should consider creating one ASAP. Again see this post of Sephy’s - All About RSS - for info on how to do that.

Faster Feed Reading.

Divide And Conquer -

Google Reader allows you to use folders with your blogs. Why would you want to use folders? Folders allow you to spend shorter amounts of time reading one group of blogs. Most of my folders I can get through in 5 minutes or less - I am a fast reader. I have 18 folders. 18×5 = 90 minutes a day.

I never sit down and read for 90 minutes at a time. I divide it up. At the end of each hour during the day I take a break from what I am doing and spend 5-10 minutes reading blogs.

Making a folder is simple- When you add a feed to your Google Reader, you click on feed settings (in the right hand corner of your screen) and select new folder. You will then be asked to name your new folder.
The Painful Truth -

We all have blogs that we LOVE reading, and then we have blogs we LIKE reading, and then we have blogs we read to inform us and give us information, and some of us have blogs we feel obliged to read because the blogger involved is very supportive of us and comments on our blog a lot - sometimes these are blogs we feel neutral or even don’t like but we keep doing it anyway.

Temptation Island - Don’t Go There!

It is very tempting to put the most loved blogs all together in one folder, and the liked blogs in another, and the information blogs in another, and the blogs we don’t want to read into their own folder. I don’t recommend doing that - what that would do is ruin your reading experience. You’ll have one folder which always gets read, one folder which gets read most days, one folder which gets read when you have the time, and one folder which never gets read. You’re setting yourself up to fail.

Mix It Up Instead -

Try to make sure you have at least one loved blog in each folder. This will ensure all folders get read regularly.

Different Views -

By clicking on Show updated or all - You can choose to view all folders and blogs - which will look like this - Or you can choose to view updated folders and blogs only - This means you will only see folders and blogs which have new posts in them. As you read the posts, the read ones will disappear and you are only left with the unread posts. This makes it a lot easier to stop in the middle of reading a folder to do something else, because when you return you’re only going to see what you have not read.

List View -

If you read any of the Bumpzee communities, you will know you often have to sort through a lot of echo chamber type posts (where everyone is talking about the same thing) in order to get to something interesting to read, and there can be a lot of new posts in those communities daily - most days the Do Follow community has over 170 posts. How can you easily filter out the noise? Use list view. What you will see is this - click for a larger image As you can see, it makes it a lot easier to pick the posts you want to read.

Expanded View -
If you choose expanded view, you will see as much of the post as the feed allows you to see. If a blogger has a full feed, you will see the entire post. If they are using a partial feed (and nobody should be using that in this day and age, if they truly want to keep their readers happy) you will only see the partial post.

The 100 Metre Dash -

Imagine you are at the Olympics in that huge stadium full of people, and you’re about to run the 100 metre dash. Next to you are the big names in running. Ready, Set, GO! You all take off, but every 5 metres you stop to do up your shoelace. That is exactly what can happen if you interrupt your blog reading to make a comment. You’ll get to the finish line but it will be a lot later than everyone else.

How To Comment?

But you want to comment on blogs, right? Of course you do. We all do. It is just that interrupting one task to do another one isn’t very efficient. So what you can do is.. open each blog you want to comment on in a new tab or window and when you’ve read that whole folder go and make your comments. There are some short cut ways to do this.

Firefox Users -

If you have a mouse with a middle scroll wheel thingy you can simply click on a link using the middle scroll and it will open the link in a new tab.

You can also right click, and choose open in a new window or open in a new tab.

You can hold down shift and click the left mouse button, and it will open the link in a new window.

Microsoft Internet Explorer Users -

If you’re using Internet Explorer 7, you can also use the middle scroll to get the link opening in a new tab.

You can use the right click, and choose open in a new window or open in a new tab.

You can hold down shift and click the left mouse button, and it will open the link in a new window.

Check Out The Trends!

If you want to be surprised, click on trends in the left hand sidebar. I bet most of you had ever done that before, right? Neither had I until 5 minutes ago, and what I found is fascinating. Before I post the graphic let me say if your site has less than 100% read rate for the last 30 days, it could be for two reasons - I’ve had to mark all read several times because I was too busy moving to read any posts those days, and if you are one of the new blogs I am reading I mark your posts read when I add you to my reader and that drags down your average. I have usually read your last 10 posts on your actual blog. This only lists 40 blogs and you can’t see the whole list in this screenshot - I have 172 blog subscriptions. According to the stats there, on average I read 143 blog posts a day. Whoa!

Further Reading -

This week Pearl from Interesting Observations has put together a wonderful post which contains all the further reading you could ever want on the topic of Google Reader - Google Reader Hacks Repository. Be sure to check it out!

As yet Sephy’s post on this topic is not online, but check his blog Sephy’s Platzish out in a couple of hours in order to see it. Update - It is now online here - Improving your Google Reader Experience

Previous Tuesday Think Tanks -

The Ups (and Downs) of Technorati
Technorati - Sending Out An SOS

Do NOT Rely On Your Site Meter
Track Your Visitors with Google Analytics

14 Reasons Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog
All About RSS

Demystifying Blogger Template Editing
Blog Design - Open Your Eyes

Say No! to Nofollow
Spam, Spiders And Do Follow, Oh My!

Stumble It -

If you enjoyed this post, please stumble it so others may enjoy it also.

Over To You -

Do you use a feed reader? If yes, which one? Do you have any tips on how to use Google Reader more efficiently? I welcome your comments and feedback.