Stuff On Sundays: It’s simple – feed me!

 

After feeding the children, husband and myself I settle on the lounge after dinner, legs stretch out on the chaise, pillow under my back and iPod in hand. While I  (sort of ) watch whatever show is on television, I  scroll through the hundreds of posts, from the hundreds of book blogs I follow, that appear in my Google reader feed each night. For me, this is the easiest way to keep up with the book blogging community.

If you aren’t sure how RSS (Really Simple Syndication) works,  essentially it’s like subscribing to a magazine that is delivered to you periodically but instead of it coming in your physical mail box each month when the magazine is published it is delivered to your ‘RSS Reader’ every time the website or blog that you follow updates. There are several RSS feed readers available, Google Reader is free and simple so I have made it my reader of choice. I used an app for a while but it was buggy so I got rid of it.

Subscribing to a feed is as easy as either looking for and clicking the RSS icon or link on a blog or, if you can’t find a link, you can manually enter a site address into your feed reader. If you have a blog and don’t have a link to your RSS feed, I strongly suggest you do – your blog host should give you the option or you can use Google’s Feedburner service. You can find the link to Book’d Out’s feed in the right hand column. You might prefer to read your feed on your desktop, laptop or whatever other device you are comfortable with and I find it’s much more convenient than going through my bookmarked list of sites.

Anyway, as I scroll through, I stop and read whatever posts catch my eye, if it is something I want to comment on, or follow up , I use the email function at the bottom of the post to send the link to my desktop. The next day at my desktop I go through the emails I have sent myself and visit the posts. It might seem a bit of a complex process but because Apple doesn’t play nicely with some  features that use Java, like Rafflecopter, and because you can only have one window at a time open on my 3rd generation iPod its often difficult to leave comments.

Periodically I go through and purge blogs from the reader – generally those that haven’t posted in the last month, or haven’t posted anything of interest to me in a while, or those who have the annoying truncated feed. It annoys me greatly when the feed from a blog is just one or two lines and then a message exhorting me to read the rest at their site, in fact it’s an effective way to ensure I won’t read a blog, because I can’t see any reason to have the feed set up like that except to increase hits on the site.

So that is how I keep up with what’s going on in the book blogging world, I also subscribe to blogs by publishers, authors and booksellers.

Do you use RSS? How do you keep up with your feed?

Add Book’d Out to your RSS feed 😉