Using Google Reader to manage the romance (and other!) blogs you visit

I read a lot of blogs – almost exclusively romance-related – romance reading (review sites like Smart Bitches and Dear Author), romance writing (Ramblings of a Romance Writing Mama, Romance University) and author blogs that may or may not be about writing (LoveCats Down Under, Pink Heart Society). All up I follow (conservatively) more than 60 blogs. The only way I could possibly manage this efficiently, is by using Google Reader. I assumed everyone used Google Reader or a similar news aggregator – but it turns out that isn’t true!

So – following my theme of a better organised and streamlined life in 2012, here’s my little guide to using Google Reader, that will hopefully save you time, too – giving you more writing/reading/living time!

What is Google Reader?

Here’s the description, straight from google: Google Reader helps you find and keep track of interesting stuff on the web. You can subscribe to your favorite websites, and keep up with what’s popular. New content comes to your Google Reader when it’s posted, so you don’t need to visit individual sites. Plus, Reader keeps track of which items you’ve read, so you only see unread items when you come back. 

That pretty much sums it up! To be a bit more technical, Google Reader is a news aggregator - it puts syndicated web content (I’ll get to that in a moment) in a single place – in this case, in your Google account. Syndicated web content is content that is made available by a web site to be “fed” into other sites. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the most popular type of feed – but really, knowing the technology isn’t necessary to use Google Reader. You probably would’ve seen little icons like this on web sites:

I have one on this site This shows that a site has a web feed available, but basically any blog will have a feed, even if they don’t show this symbol.

Now I’ve got past the technical stuff, here is what Google Reader actually looks like:

My Google Reader home page

But, I normally read Google Reader on my phone (Google Reader app is available for Android, and I’d assume iPhone – sorry, don’t have an iPhone to check!), which provides a really simple feed of my latest, unread, subscribed blog posts:

Reader on my phone

When you open a blog post, it opens in Reader, too – read on for more info on how this works.

Setting up Google Reader

First off, you need a Google Account. If you already have a Gmail account, you’re all set! Otherwise, creating a Google account is easy, just go to the Google Accounts Sign In page, and click “Sign up for a new Google Account”. The follow the instructions on screen.

Once you have your Google account, go to any Google page (Google.com, your Gmail screen etc), and in the bar across the top, click “More”, then “Reader”:

Where to find Google Reader

Reader will then open, but it will be empty – time to add some subscriptions!

Shiny, new - and empty - Google Reader

Adding Subscriptions

To add a subscription to Google Reader, click the big red “Subscribe” button at the top left of the screen:

Click the big red button!

The cool thing about Reader, is that you have three ways to subscribe. First, the easiest – just search for the blog name:

Enter the blog name

Then click “Add”.

Google will then search for web feeds that match your search. Sometimes the same feed is listed multiple times in the results – I’m not sure why! A good double check before subscribing is to check that the feed address (below the result) contains the web address of the site you are trying to subscribe too, and that if it’s a popular blog, that there are a good number of subscribers. Just to make sure you don’t subscribe to the wrong feed – although don’t worry if you do, you can just unsubscribe – no harm done

Search results

Once you have the right feed (more often that not it’s the first result), click “Subscribe”:

Subscribed!

Once subscribed, a tick will appear beneath the search result, and the feed will appear in the left hand menu. All done!

Note: If you wish you can add your subscriptions to different folders by using the “Add to a folder” drop down once you subscribe. I started to do this, then gave up and just added my subscriptions outside of folders, as when reading on my phone I’m happy for everything to be mixed together.

You can also subscribe by entering a site’s/blog’s web address:

Subscribing with site's web address

This will reduce the number of search results you receive (it is the only result), so is a little faster than searching for “LoveCats” for example, that brings up unrelated blog results (in this example, searching for “LoveCats” has the correct feed as the eighth result).

Note: If there is only one result, Google Reader will subscribe you to that feed automatically. Again, you can easily unsubscribe if it’s the wrong feed.

And the final way to subscribe is to enter the web feed address. This will guarantee only a single result, and therefore instant subscription. To find a feed address, you can click on the orange web feed icon on a site (like the one at the beginning of this post). It will take you to a confusing looking page of code – ignore all that, and just copy and paste the web address (in address bar) into Google Reader:

Subscribing with feed address (ignore random cursor line in the address, sorry!)

BTW – this is my feed: http://www.leah-ashton.com/feed/

Using Google Reader

I’ve quickly subscribed to another few blogs in the test account I created for this blog post – it took me about two minutes. This is what Reader now looks like:

All done!

Down the left are my subscribed blogs – clicking on one will take me to a page in reader that lists all the unread posts for each of those blogs. In the middle are the latest blogs from my subscriptions. To read, I can just click on the title – and this also opens in Google Reader:

Reading a blog post - the entire post appears in Reader.

If I want to comment on the post, or read other comments, I need to go view the post on it’s own site – just by clicking the heading as shown above.

You can also read entire posts on your phone (how I read most of my subscribed blogs):

Reading on my phone

So, there you have it – a quick guide to Google Reader. I hope it was useful!

If you have any questions, ask away!

Leah