Thursday Tech Tip – Google Reader Basics
Posted on Thursday, Mar 12, 2009A couple of weeks ago, I posted about how to organize your RSS feeds in Google Reader. Regular reader (no pun intended) Christina of Stacked asked me for a more basic introduction to Google Reader. Since I am all about customer service (and she’s the nice gal who nominated me for the BlogNet Award), I am happy to comply.
Let’s start at the beginning. What is an RSS feed? In a nutshell, it’s a way for a blog or other online type resource to publish its updates in a way that can be consumed by some other site or program.
That probably didn’t help. Let me try again.
An RSS feed is a way for a blog to tell anyone who is listening “Hey! I have new content! And maybe I’ll tell you what that content is!” But the only people who can hear it are those who have gotten the special earphones (aka “subscribers”).
Most blogs publish an RSS feed. Some make it really easy to figure out what their feed is, and others aren’t quite as clear about it. Generally speaking, if you take the URL of the site in question (for example, https://52.25.237.31) and put “/feed” (for most WordPress blogs) or “/atom.xml” (this is how Blogger does it) at the end, it will result in the URL of the RSS feed for that site. Just remember that. It’s going to be helpful later.
Now that we have the basics of RSS under our collective belts, it’s time to get started with our Reader. There are lots and lots of ways to read RSS feeds. Some of them are actual, factual programs you run on your computer device. Others are websites. I prefer the website variety, as that way I can get to my feeds on any computer. Some popular website-based RSS readers include Netvibes, Bloglines, and, of course, Google Reader. For purposes of this post, we are going to focus exclusively on Google Reader (also referred to as GReader). I’m sure I will get many many comments from folks insisting that their preferred feed reader (sometimes referred to by nerd like me as an “aggregator”) is better. And, quite honestly, I welcome those comments. But I was asked to write about GReader, and thus I shall do. Also, it’s what I use personally.
Step one – visit https://www.google.com/reader and log in with your Google Account. If you have Gmail, this is easy. If you don’t, you might already have a Google Account anyway. If you are one of the five people on the planet who have yet to acquire one, you’ll have to sign up first.
Once you are inside your GReader, it will walk you through the process of adding feeds for you to read. You can happily take the suggestions it gives you, but chances are, you already know some of the sites you want to subscribe to. Remember a few paragraphs back when we talked about how to find the RSS feed of a site? I hope so, because it’s going to be critical to know this now. Pick one of those site’s RSS feed url and copy it into your clipboard (If I have to teach you copy/paste, I am seriously making you stay after blog school).
Now, look up at the top left of your GReader window. See that nice button that says “Add a Subscription”?
Press it. Go ahead…it’ll be fun.
In the text box that pops up, paste in the URL of the site’s RSS feed that you want to subscribe to and click “Add”. After a second or two, posts from your new subscription will show up in the right pane of GREader.
You will see that each blog entry for that feed shows up as a separate “box” on the right. You can read through each one by clicking on each, but that could take a while. Keyboard shortcuts are your friend. In GReader, the J key will move to the next post, and the K key moves to the previous post.
You also will notice that in addition to being able to read all posts from a particular feed all at once, you can also scroll through new posts from every blog you subscribe to. That’s what that nifty “All Items” link on the left menu is for. This is a great way to read your feeds. Well, it’s a great way if you think the way that I do. You might disagree.
Notice at the top of the right pane where it says “25 New Items”? That means GReader is only showing you posts that are unread by you. If you want to see old posts too, simply click on “all items”. This is a setting to be careful with. I accidentally spent a week being irritated with GReader for not “remembering” what I’d read, only to later realize I’d accidentally set it to “all items”. Yes, even tech nerds like myself can make stupid mistakes sometimes.
There are lots and lots of other cool things you can do with you GReader, including Starring posts you want to save for later, Sharing posts with your friends, and even get a bunch of trending statistics on the popularity of feeds. But these are all topics for future Tech Tips. Trust me – I still have a lot to say about GReader, and I hope you’ll all keep coming back for more.