Week 2 #3 - Blogging - Why and how would you subscribe?

So you've found quite a few interesting blogs in the past few weeks and you want to keep up with the articles but you don't want to visit each blog every day to read them. What can you do?

Give yourself a pat on the back if you said subscribe!

Each blog has a feed which contains a title and description. Software or applications such as feed aggregators/feed readers can collect and organise these feeds and display updated articles from the bogs (or even some web pages).

Wikipedia explain aggregators/feed readers quite well:

"Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or "personal newspaper." Once subscribed to a feed, an aggregator is able to check for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the update." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_aggregator


Examples of the aggregators or feed readers include Google Reader (to which you already have access if you have a Blogger blog), Bloglines, Rojo. Even Firefox and later versions of Internet Explorer have built-in feed readers.

How do people advertise that their pages have a feed? They use a little orange broadcast symbol such as the one in my sidebar or they might use the terms subscribe and RSS or Atom. If I click on the orange subscribe symbol in my sidebar I'm taken to the Feed. I can select my reader from the list.




For more information on subscribing to blogs, please check out my blog help page on the Eastern Regional Libraries website.

Next up I'll show you how to advertise your feed.

Cheers, webgurl

Week 2 #3 Blogging - Adding feeds

The great thing about Google taking over Blogger is some of the cool new features. I can add links to my shared articles in Google Reader to my Blogger blog.

I can sign into Google Reader using my Blogger/Google login and search for any feeds from blogs or podcasts that people might be interested in. Feeds are files that contain titles and descriptions of content updated from websites or blogs. Bear with me with these images as this template is not very wide.

I can use a browse or keyword search for blogs/podcasts to which I can subscribe.



Let's say I type in fiction, I get a list of results including

Fiction and Poetry, Crime Fiction Dossier, Science Fiction News, etc.

I click on the + subscribe button to subscribe to these feeds. The list of blogs to which I subscribe appears on the left of Google Reader.


When I click on one of the blogs I can see a list of articles appear on the right of Google Reader. I click on one of the articles and click on the Share button.


OK, so I can do this over and over to build up a list of shared articles. Now it's time to add this to Blogger.

I click on the link to shared items in the menu at the left of Google Reader. Then I click on the link that says to add a clip to your blog. This will open up a popup window.


I choose a title for the shared items, a color scheme and click on the Add to Blogger button.


Blogger adds a widget to my sidebar with links to the shared articles. The Blogger layout template will open in a new window or tab and you'll see the widget display in the sidebar. You can place your mouse over this and move it further down the sidebar. When you are finished click on the Save button. This will save the template.



Now go and visit your blog and see if it worked.

You can change the articles you want to share. Unshare some and add others.

Let me know if it works or if you get totally lost! Have fun

Cheers, webgurl