What is a Reader?
In Google’s own words:
“Google Reader is a tool for gathering, reading, and sharing all the interesting blogs and websites you read on the web.”
A reader allows you to “subscribe” to the blogs and websites you want to follow and organizes them in one place. It is something I highly recommend if you follow more than a handful of blogs. Instead of bookmarking each blog individually and continuously revisiting them just to see if they have been updated, you should add them to your Reader. Then when you are ready to read your favorite blogs, you visit your Reader and it highlights all unread blog posts and allows you to read them all without leaving the page.
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| My Google Reader |
I have over 120 blogs that I follow. Some of them post daily, some weekly, and some only monthly. Before I started using Google Reader, it was frustrating trying to visit each blog individually to see if there was anything new. Now—it’s easy peasy with a reader.
I chose Google Reader because it’s easy to use and I already have a Google account. There are others out there, but I don’t know much about them.
Getting started
Joining Google Reader
If you already have a Google account, then you simple need to visit www.reader.google.com, sign in, and you are good to go!
If you don’t have a Google account, visit www.reader.google.com and simply click “create an account” on the right side of the page. It’s really simple and painless—email, password, birthday—that’s pretty much it.
Adding a blog to your Reader
There are two ways to add a blog to your Reader:
1. Click “Add Subscription” on the top left of the Reader page. Type or paste the blog’s web address, then click “add”. That’s it! After a second the newly added blog should appear in the subscriptions window. This is usually the way I use.
2. Many blogs have button on their pages that look like this 
, or it may say “RSS”, or—like mine—“subscribe with a reader”. Click that button. Typically it will lead to a page that give options of which reader you want to use to subscribe. We are using Google Reader, so choose that one and then you’re subscribed!
While you’re at it, you can practice adding my blog!
You should do it right now.
I’ll wait. . .
Did you do it?
Great! I’ll love you all forever for that!
Reading a post on Reader
If a blog has any updated posts that you have not read, it will be bolded in your subscriptions window. Click on the bolded blog name and the post will open in the main window on the page.
However, my personal preference is to click on “All Items” near the top of the page, which puts all unread posts in one continuous stream instead of needing to select each bolded blog individually. I guess I’m just lazy like that.
Hint #1: Reader’s default setting for viewing posts in the main window is from newest to oldest. This bothers me. I feel like I’m reading backwards or skipping ahead to the last chapter of a book. To fix this, you can click on “view settings” and choose “sort by oldest”.
Hint #2: Sometimes I like to read particular posts outside of Reader and on the blog’s website itself. It’s prettier and sometimes the formatting is easier to follow. To easily do this, click the arrow on the post’s header.
Tips and Tricks
A few helpful keyboard shortcuts:
- · j – scrolls through to the next item in the list
- · k – scrolls backwards to the previous item in the list
- · f – fullscreen (press f a second time to exit fullscreen)
Tags:
Tags are a way to bookmark posts of interest. Tags are found at the end of each post. You can use any word as a tag. You can add more than one tag (just make sure you separate each tag with a comma). Once created, the tags are found below the blog titles in the subscriptions window.
That's it! Well, the basics anyway . . .
Please, please, please let me know if you have any questions or if there's anything I need to clarify.
Let me know if this was helpful or if you have any other tips for using Google Reader. I love comments!
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