Making your life easier with Google Reader

Everyone has to give this a shot. I have laid out clear instructions. Fast, Easy and will improve your time spent viewing blogs you follow.

You already have Google Reader if you have a blogger/gmail/google account.

(NOTE: click on any of the images to make them larger)

Step 1:
To make this easy, you can start at www.google.com, if you are not signed in to your blogger or gmail account, do so before starting these steps.

Do as this image shows and click on the more drop down (upper left extra menu). Locate Reader in the list (second to last) and click on it.


Step 2:
You will first enter your blank feed reader. This is what it should generally look like without any RSS feeds. Now, lets get crack'n to make life happy...







Step 3:
To simply add a subscription (left side column) click on the button and enter an address in the pop-up green thing. Test it with any family or friend blog. You can put any blog from blogger/blogspot into this box and it will work.

If you follow other blog on other topics, you can enter the web address to see if they have RSS. Google Reader will try to find the right feed for you.

Copy & Paste the link for accurateness.



Step 5:

*Wallah!* Now you have a blog in your RSS Feed Reader. You can Mark all as Read if you want to start with a clean slate and/or read through them to mark as read. It works like your email inbox.

How this will improve your life? Instead of running all over the internet to see if anyone has posted on their blog, just go to www.google.com/reader (signed in) and it acts just like in e-mail inbox. You will know if any of us posted by the new items.


Tip 1:
Add a couple more blogs to your Reader.

Now you can refine your view of the blog feed. It will default to the Expanded View but I find it nicer to view in List View.

Go to the right side of the page and view these three links, Feed Settings, Expanded View , and List View. Play around between the two views to see which one you like best.



Tip 2: Lastly, click on the Feed Settings button to get this drop down list of options. I like to rename my family and friends blogs to their names (like on the links list in my blog). The blog will default to the title they chose as their blog name... such as mine, "Our Blog-o-Rama" would be the name of the blog. You can rename this to, "Molly & John".