Getting the most from Google Reader
For the past month I’ve been using Google Reader on a daily basis. Not only have I discovered a wealth of information from the 100’s of blogs I’ve subscribed too, I’ve also discovered some wonderful functionality - some of which you can find on the sidebar of this blog.
Thanks to Elly I learned how to display an accurate selection of my currently subscribed to blogs. This is usually reserved for the Wordpress links feature and came under the Blogroll heading. The difference being, my blogroll was never 100% up to date - it’s an easy thing to forget between posting new articles and tweaking the occasional feature or blog design. Today if I want to add a blog to my Blogroll I simply drag and drop it into the folders that I’ve created in Google Reader and it immediately appears on my own blog.
I went through a phase of using Digg, to social bookmark - to display a list of articles that I had read, that I found interesting and wanted to share. Google Reader has a similar feature built-in, though it doesn’t tell you how many other people have also marked an article as sharing-worthy, this might be something they will add once it has come out of beta. The last 5 articles I have marked interesting also now appear in the sidebar and the full list can be viewed here, you can even subscribe to this as it has it’s own RSS feed. If anyone else has one of these going, let me know. Sharing IS caring after all.
As I do most of my blog reading from work, I often don’t have the time to read everything, especially the longer articles. Obviously I’m not going to want to add it to my shared items if I haven’t read it, for this I can add a little star and view these starred articles on their own at a later date. This is especially practical if I find something related to my studies but don’t have the time to completely process the information. This is also great if someone posts a video or mp3 you want to watch/listen to when you’re in the comfort of your own computer.
