Google has come out with another amazing new application. Google Reader adds to their already fantastic list of free programs such as analytics, gmail, google talk, and then the program many people use for very blogs, blogger/blogspot itself.
The new program Google Reader is an ingenious way to check all the blogs you read simultaneously, using only one website! Now instead of having to open in new windows the dozens of sites you read, you can now just open up your account in Google Reader, and it will tell you the sites have been updated or not.
One of my favorite parts about the application, is that you don’t need to click on every new update to make it no longer be new. All that you have to do is simply scroll down over the entire article, and it will immediately switch into the “read,” no longer “unread.” It’s not like email where you have to select every email you want switched to unread, then click mark as unread; this does it instantly. This is a huge timesaver, and gives you more time to spend on your own blog posts.
*Instructions for Set Up*
For those of you who are completely new to the internet, the way to make an account for this is easy (assuming you already have a google account which is also easy.) First you go to www.google.com, then click in the top right corner “sign in.” Or if you are already signed in then click “my account.” Next it says at the bottom of the page “try something new,” and beneath that is a link, “more.” Once you’ve clicked on the “more” you’ll see a list of applications you can add to your account, Google Reader is under the list that says “communicate, show & share.” Simply click on the link and Viola you have it now added to your account. Any time you want to go to it now, just go to the Google homepage, then select “my account,” it has not been added as one of your applications and can be gone to in just a click. Now that you have it added to your account and clicked on it, you just need to find the button on the side of the page that says, “Add Subscription” with a little blue plus sign next to it. Click on that and simply add the pages you want it to track. When you first add sites typically it will already say there’s a bunch new messages, so you’ll need to scroll over them all to make them old so you can start with zero new updates. And then instead of checking each of the blogs you read individually, now you can simply go to this page and it will tell you if they’ve written a new blog post.
*Bonus*
To those of you who are blogging not just for fun and have competition, as far as I can tell this can’t be tracked by traffic spiders like Google Analytics or Statcounter… So feel free to visit this as many times as you want without giving your competitor lots of hits. He won’t even be able to tell your reading his blog posts, and yet you’ll be able to keep track of him/her without helping him out.
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