Feed readers and what they can do for you

In case you're reading this to read about walks, if you are familiar with feed readers go ahead and skip this post. If not, please read it anyway. This is something new to me that I learned about through class. If you want to follow a blog or news feed, this is what the orange icons, such as this example and links to subscribe are for. This can be very useful especially if you follow very many blogs. First, you will need to have a reader. The one I have started using is the Google Reader, which is a web based reader so all you need is an internet connection and you can read your blogs from any computer.  To get started go to google's webpage, click on the more link and then go down to reader. Then sign up for an account. Using a reader and subscribing to feeds can save you a lot of time. Instead of going to the website for each blog to read it, you just go to your reader, sign in and all the blog posts that you haven't read are listed in one place.  It is also easy to unsubscribe if you decide this content is not for you, unlike when something is sent to your email and then you may have difficulty getting off a list because the link to do so isn't valid.

The reader program can also keep track for you when you have read a post. One disadvantage of this is that if you scroll through the post without actually reading it, it will be marked as read unless you either specially tell it not to mark it as read or you disable this function and then you will need to mark each item as read after you have read it. Another disadvantage of a feed reader is that you can't see the url of where the information is coming from, so it can be difficult to identify the source if you need to do so. It can also be very addicting to use them and by having the content come to you instead of having to go out and look for it you could become overwhelmed with too many posts to read if signing up for many sites with frequent updates.