How to read this (and every other) blog

Image borrowed from Sarah Palin's Alaska, possibly the least practical state for a bicycle paper route.

SO, fair warning, if you already know what an RSS feed is, or you prefer your FS bloggers to stay on message and talk about the FS, you can stop here. 

Still with me?  Great.

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With the tremendous upsurge in blog popularity in the last 7-10 years, more and more people are consistently reading blogs as a primary source of information, not just about the blogger themself, but about the blogger's profession or location.  As interests expand, people tend to pick up more and more blogs and bloggers, until the number of people whose lives, careers and interests they follow can't reasonably be recalled off the top of their heads.  (as a self-guided language test, I tried to translate that last sentence into Turkish.  It was impossible.)


A number of people I know enjoy reading their friends' blogs, or other popular blogs, but get frustrated when people fail to post for a long period, or forget to check and give up when they see they are 25 posts behind.  This simply will not do.


Since it's in my interest that you keep reading this blog, rather than replace it with one of the many, many better blogs out there, I want to fill you all in on a little secret.  You can subscribe to these things.  When I (or any other blogger) post, you get it automatically.  When I don't post, you miss nothing.  This is free, easy, and doesn't require you to sign up for anything (or much of anything), so there's no reason not to start right away.

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The first thing you will need to understand is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication.  This is a service that turns formatted blog posts, articles, or anything on the web that periodically updates into simple text and pictures, and sends it to you.  An individual subscription is called a feed, and you subscribe to these feeds using an RSS reader, or an RSS aggregator.  There are hundreds of these, but anyone with a google or GMail account (and this should truly be all of you) has access to a great one -- Google Reader.


Sign yourself up with your google account name and password, and you're halfway there. 


At the top left corner of the page, under the Google logo, there will be a button labeled "Add a subscription".  It looks like this:

Click on that button, and you're given a search field.  This being Google, you can enter whatever search terms come to mind.  You might, for instance, want to subscribe to one of my favorite blogs, "Muttering Behind the Hardline".  You'd type that in, and it would look like this:

Upon hitting "Add", you are presented with a series of options.  Look through them, just as would any google search result, and see which seems correct.  In our case, the first result is correct (and every other result as well).  When you find the one you want, just hit "+ Subscribe".


And there you have it, subscribed!

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This method assumes that you can remember all the blogs you like off the top of your head, which I cannot.  You can enter other terms in the search field, like "classic cars" or "tennis", "balkan cuisine", or of course "Foreign Service" and get good results as well, but perhaps the best way is to subscribe from the webpage itself.


For that, you need to know two things:

   1. Which feed (website, newspaper, blog, etc.) you wish to subscribe to, and
   2. What the RSS logo looks like.

While I can't be of much help with the former, the latter I can do.

 
BAM!  That's is your ticket to in-depth ruminations about what kind of tea your kids' dog prefers, which phone is undoubtedly the best, and how to properly cook pasta al dente.  Usually it's located in your browser's address bar (where http://www.valdysses.com is displayed right now) on the far right, but many pages also have that icon strewn around everywhere.

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Even easier than that is adding a "subscribe" button to your bookmarks directly.  Simply drag the word Subscribe... directly from this blog post into your shortcuts and, when you visit a site you want to follow, click the link.  It will take you right to your Google reader page and load up the subscription for you to confirm.  Easy as it gets, and far better than typing my blog address all the time, only to be disappointed by my erratic posting.


If I messed anything up or left anything out, please let me know in comments.  Otherwise, enjoy your new, streamlined life.