RSS Feeds and Following Blogs

One of the easiest ways to read blogs is to subscribe to their RSS Feed (which stands for Really Simple Syndication - PC Mag). This means that you create an account with an RSS Reader.

There are different readers, but the one I use is Google Reader. It was a default choice. I have a Gmail account and my blog is hosted by Blogger (both are Google entities).

What a reader allows you to do is subscribe to multiple RSS feeds and gives you the power to organize these feeds by type. For example, you could organize your blog subscriptions with categories such as storytime, YA blogs, crafts, etc., which makes it very easy to scan your reader and decide what you want to read.

Basically, the advantage to using a reader is this: You don't have to keep visiting websites to see if they've updated their content, you can access your account from multiple computers (whereas you can't with bookmarks), you can organize the content, and it is easy and convenient.

Here is what it looks like to read something in your Google Reader:

What do you lose with a Reader? You will not see anything on the Reader outside the blog post. You will probably have to click through to visit the blog to actually comment. If a blogger has added content like something that shows their Twitter feed, you will not see that either.