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Google Reader Can Make Your Life Easier - Here’s How.

September 25th, 2007 Comments(12)

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!

14 Reasons Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog.

August 21st, 2007 Comments(41)

NOTE - If you link to me and you do not appear in my sidebar, please contact me and let me know. I want to link back to you and read your blog. I will be trying to find all the sites that link to me but it is difficult and time consuming. It would be much easier if you just sent me an email with a link to your blog.

Now I’ve got that out of the way..

I’ve been working on clearing out my Google Reader. I have gone from 215 subscriptions back to 143 - a huge drop. This is no easy task, but some bloggers have made it easy for me to make the decision - keep reading, or unsubscribe? Here’s some of the reasons why I have unsubscribed from some of the blogs.

Posts Too Long.

Writing one huge long post every week and posting rarely in between. There was one blog on my google reader, I kid you not, who would write posts averaging between 4,000 to 5,000 words once a week. Was it anything I could use? No. It was simply egotistical shyte where the blogger answered a whole bunch of questions other readers had asked - some of you may know the blog I mean..

Their last post in my reader was 5261 words, 28792 characters and just to give you an idea, I pasted it into word. It went for 15 pages. ONE POST!!!!!! And people say my posts are long, ya’all ain’t seen nothing yet! Just for comparison sake - this post is 2199 words long, 11276 characters and was four pages when I posted it into word.

I don’t mind a long post, if you have something useful and interesting to say. If you’re just pandering to your massive ego, I’m hitting unsubscribe.

Too Pithy.

Every post you wrote was three lines or less. Every. Single. One. I enjoy pith as much as the next person, but there is such a thing as too much pith. Give me some substance!

Where Are You?

Some of the blogs deleted last week had not been updated at all in over 6 months. Hello, you had people who were reading you and you went and blew it. Maybe you got busy. Maybe you got a life. Maybe you got hit by a bus. I don’t know, and now I’ll never know, because you just left me hanging. I’ve unsubscribed. Readers of this blog will be happy to know, if something happened to me I have a plan all ready to deal with it. You’ll never be left wondering here.

You Went Quiet.

You used to post regularly and I was loving it, but now I realise I haven’t heard from you in a couple of months - and your last post didn’t say “I’m going on holidays” “I’m taking a break from blogging” “I have to do (insert important thing) so you may not hear from me so much over the next few (length of time)”. If it did, I’d be ok waiting. Seriously. We all have lives to live.

They have a term for this with nuclear submarines - going quiet. Unless you happen to be living in one, it’s not a good idea to do it with your blog. Readers will unsubscribe - like I just did. Let people know if you’re going to be away for a bit. It’s a nice thing to do for your loyal readers.

You’re A Wanna-be.

I linked to you for at least 6 months and I told you I was linking to you via a comment. You never linked back. In your links list all I see are “a-list” bloggers. All you talk about is what the “a-list” bloggers are saying or doing. If I wanted to know what the “a-list” bloggers were saying or doing, I’d be reading them. I don’t read them. I wanted to read *you*, not some poor soul wishing they could be on the “a-list” and sucking up to the “a-list” bloggers in every post.

I’ll give that link to another blogger who deserves it more. Good luck getting the “a-list” bloggers to link back to you. Just a hint you might be able to use - if you annoy enough people who link to you, you won’t ever get to be an “a-list” blogger because regular non-a-list people won’t link to you or subscribe to your feed. Spread your link love around and base it on content, not what supposed list the blog is on.

I’m not feeling it.

In order for me to read your blog, I have to sometimes know what you are talking about. There is one blogger I deleted because they write these major in depth posts that read like a legal document. On a personal blog. There is never any personal posts, never any images and a lot of 50 cent words you only hear used in spelling bees.

If you’re writing like that on your personal blog, maybe you need to take a holiday. Relax. Not that I can’t handle in depth posts and legal wording but from time to time, chill out and have a laugh! Tell me something funny that happened to you. Lighten up.

I’m overwhelmed.

Some people post too much. Two to three posts a day is one thing. Four every day, you may be pushing it. 5-15 posts a day is way out of control. I want to know about you but not every single detail that happens in your life! Learn to edit. Write things and put them aside for a wrap up post, one longer post instead of 6 short little ones.

I’m writing this on Saturday the 18th of August. I’ve already posted three things today. Tomorrow I post one thought of the day and the weekly wrap up. The earliest this will be posted is Monday. That’s ok. My writing doesn’t have an expiration date. I know you’re not sitting at home waiting. You have a life. You have other blogs to read. So do I. Don’t pummel me with posts!

Your Content Went AWOL.

Some bloggers have got into paid posts so much that it is all they blog about anymore. I’m all about supporting a bloggers right to make money but if you aren’t providing non-paid content as well, you will lose your readers, and consequently find it harder to get paid blogging jobs. My personal rule is follow up a paid post with non paid content soon after posting the paid content, at least on the same day. If you’re doing that, give yourself a pat on the back.

Your Content Was Negative

Not one positive post in the whole time I’ve been reading you? All you want to do is whinge and you aren’t prepared to look at the positives in life? Sorry, that’s not for me. I prefer positive thought. Occasional snark is one thing, I can appreciate that. Being mad at the world 24/7/365? I’m feeling sorry for you and it’s depressing the heck out of me. Let me off this rollercoaster ride into negativity!

I’m Waiting.

One post a month? One post every two months? That’s all you can manage? Seriously? Are your readers so unimportant to you? You have nothing to say? You can’t find a news article to speak about? You got nothing? You can’t ask for guest posters? You’re too busy to have a blog. Seriously. I’m unable to deal with such long gaps between posts unless your content is *incredible*.

You Moved.

Without telling me more than once - and now I’ve lost that connection to you. Here’s a piece of advice for moving bloggers. Keep your old blog for at least a month. Once a week during that month, post a reminder that you have moved on your old blog. That’s for your feed readers, who may not have received the message the one time you sent it out. They may have hit “mark all as read” because there were 500 posts in one folder and they couldn’t face reading it.

Give your readers every possible chance to follow you. They are not expecting you to move and are unprepared for it. Me personally I’d be posting “I’ve moved here” once a week on that old blog for six to eight weeks.

You Were Cliquey.

Some bloggers just want their friends reading. They could make their blogs private so the rest of us don’t get attached and then hurt when they leave us out, ignore us and our comments, and refuse to link back to us.

Template Issues.

Every time I visited your site, you had a different template. And I visited your site a lot over the space of a few weeks, I told you how much I liked a couple of the templates but one day I got tired of the constant switching, things moving around.. it was just too much. Sorry. Your content was ok but not good enough to overcome the massive template indecision. Let me guess, you change clothes five times a day, right?

You Told Me You Were Quitting.

I understand, but I’ll miss you. In order to keep the blogroll alive, I’ve taken your link down but if you come back, I’ll put it up before I finish reading your first post saying you’re returning to blogging, I promise. Thank you so much for everything, I enjoyed your blogging.

But Wait A Minute?

Some of you may have read this list and thought “I do that” “Ouch, I’ve made that mistake” or even “I never realised how annoying that could be to my readers, I’ll never do it again!” If so, that is fantastic. It will make your blog even better - for me and for all your readers.

If your name is still over on that sidebar list of blogs I read via google reader, it means one of two things.

1. You are linking to me, which I deeply appreciate, thanks! I’ll never de-link you while you link to me. If I did it by accident please let me know. This job has been evil and I have been working on it for over a week now and still have not tracked down everyone linking to me.

2. I love you so much I can’t let you go. Even though you don’t link to me. It would be nice if you did, but I enjoy your writing and I’m giving you that link because of it. If you don’t enjoy mine, you probably shouldn’t be linking to me.

For 95% of the blogs listed there, it is both. There’s a few blogs over there doing a few of the above things, so perhaps take a moment to consider whether you are being considerate of your readers and mindful of what could make them unsubscribe from your feed.

Please note I read the Australian (and US) Blogs Community via RSS as one feed - if your blog is a part of that community I may not have listed it a second time in the list of blogs I read via google reader. If I listed it twice, that is my mistake but extra link love for you..

My Future Policy

Things have to change here because I can’t face doing this job once every six months, and I don’t have the time to be constantly updating this list. So here’s my thoughts on a good compromise. Some of you reading this may want to try the same thing, or publish your future policy so all your readers can be aware of it..

1. If I like your blog, I am going to add it to a folder in my reader called “new”. I will also add it to a block on the sidebar called “New Blogs I like”.
2. I will list your blog in the weekly wrap up when I add you.
3. I will comment and let you know I did this.
4. Once every 3-6 months, I will review this folder.
5. Blogs I have come to love will be added in to the main “Blogs I read with google reader” list.
6. Blogs that have linked back to me will be added in to the main “Blogs I read with google reader” list. There’s an easy way to make sure I keep linking to you right there. I’ll never de-link you while you link to me.
7. Blogs I didn’t feel that connection with will be removed from the reader and the sidebar.

Get you some google reader?

June 12th, 2007 Comments(6)

Christine mentioned in yesterday’s comments that I should stop by her blog as she had lots of new posts.. Well I have a little something to tell you. I’m there, all the time - and not only am I there, I am on 140 other blogs, plus about 120 bumpzee blogs, all at once. How can I manage to be in so many places? Is there magic involved? Click for a better view -
Yes, there is - google reader magic. Anytime you write a post, it comes to me as a surprise in my google reader, usually within 2-3 hours of you posting it. This means I can know what is going on everywhere but the one downside of google reader is, it does not tell a blogger who is reading their feed. That’s why I usually leave a comment to let people know, hey, I’ve got you in my google reader now. Of course unless I fully explain that then people have no real idea what that means, so I hope this post helps to let people know that I’m blog-stalking them all the time without them having a clue.

So you can see by looking at the picture above that I have some folders in there - because there are so many blogs I like to divide them up into groups - and that the blog names which have new posts are in bold with a number after them. When you click on the group name (ie group1) you get all the newest posts from that group to read through. It really has changed the way I read blogs - and there is no way I would be able to read so many blogs without it. If you don’t use it, I highly recommend giving it a try.

I do have to apologise though because this weekend was pretty crazy with all the stuff I had going on, I missed out on commenting on about 100 posts which I had something to say but not the time, so please accept my apology for not dropping by on a lot of blogs just recently.

We made pizza, which seemed to take a very long time. We played pool. We did a fair bit of housework because things were getting quite messy and The Other Half’s bathroom looked like aliens had landed in there due to me buying him a new towel and then him getting towel fluff on every surface possible. Do not ask me how he managed this for I do not know! I did some painting. We went beach walking - and I have some photos, coming soon. I re-did the template for this blog, and I also have been working on blogzreview, and I caught up on West Wing episodes, managing four over the weekend yay!

Those members of the Australian Blogs Community as well as the US blogs community may not know that they’re coming through to me on an RSS feed via google reader. This means I can read all the community blogs at once. It only gives me the first 250 characters, then I have to click to read the rest. It is really handy. Here’s a view of that.So, hopefully now you know that even if you don’t see me on your trackers, I’m still reading you loud and clear, and I’ll be dropping by when I get a chance.

My new blog commenting task.

June 04th, 2007 Comments(8)

I’m going to set myself the challenge of visiting all the blogs in the blogging chicks network, and commenting on as many as I can. I recently joined the network and I can’t wait to get into reading through the blogs on it. You can see the list of blogs in my sidebar. If you’re a chick you should join.

Also, I’ve finally finished adding the blogs I read in google reader to my sidebar. This means I now have some organisation going on here people! And one of the new things I am implementing is a “new blogz” folder in google reader. When I find a new blog I like, I’m adding it to that section and commenting to people that I’ve added them to my google reader. Hopefully depending on the amount of time I have, once a month or so I will go through and add them all to my sidebar.

It might seem like I’m a slave to reading blogs if you look at the amount of blogs there. The truth is quite different. I’m a really fast reader. I always have been. On average it takes me 2 hours to read a book of average size. So when it comes to blog reading, I turn up here with my coffee in the morning and I whiz through 100+ blog posts in the space of half an hour. Any ones I want to comment on (and this is becoming more and more lately) I open them in a new tab. Once I’m done with coffee, I spend a little time commenting, then it’s off to other tasks for the day. From time to time during the day when I have completed a task, I reward myself by checking in on any new blog posts. Not all of the people on the list blog daily, some of the people on the list blog once or twice a month.

The best new thing I’ve been involved with recently has been the Australian Blog Community. I love the RSS feed because it gives you the first 250 characters of a post and if that interests me, I right click and read the rest. I am really enjoying it, and I also am reading the US Blog Community which was set up by Sephy. If you’re in either of these countries and you have a blog, why not join the communities? If you’re elsewhere, why not make one for your country?

Snoskred - Life in the Country

Archive for the 'google reader' Category

Google Reader Can Make Your Life Easier - Here’s How.

14 Reasons Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog.

Get you some google reader?

My new blog commenting task.

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