West Baptist Church

Here’s a clever tip for getting the most out of this website.

If you don’t already use a subscription service to keep you in touch with what’s new on your favourite sites, here’s how.  It’s easy, free, secure and saves you time (heaps if you’re on dial-up) and thought.  It’s kind of like having your own research assistant to clip interesting articles from the internet and put them in one place for you.

Here’s my attempt at a Brent-style failsafe recipe for how to make sure you’re always the first to know when there’s something new on this site or any other you’re interested in (like grabaseat, your friends’ blogs, a craft or sport or books site, etc):

1. Go to the Google Reader homepage and click ‘Create an Account‘ (or ‘Take a Tour’ to see how it works first).  If you already have a gmail account, go to your inbox, click ‘Reader’ at the top left, and skip to step 3.

2. Follow the instructions to set up an account (you can then use this to open a Gmail account for email if you like, but you don’t have to).

3. When your account is set up, sign into it (with your email address and password) and click ‘Add a Subscription’ to sign up to the websites you want to be kept up to date with.  You can do this by putting in the address of the website, or skip to step 4 for an easy shortcut.

4. Stay signed in and open a new window or tab to visit the websites you’re interested in.  Like this one, for instance!  Go to this site, and click the little square button on the top right of any page, labelled ‘RSS’.  Your browser will then automatically give you a couple of options.  Click ‘Add to Google Reader’.

5.  You’ll be taken straight to your Reader, and all the latest blog posts will be sitting there smiling at you.  Click on each one to read it (you may need to click further to get the whole post and be redirected – we can adjust this from the website, so your feedback will be valuable!).

6. Whenever you’re online, have a quick look at your Reader account and see what’s new on all your favourite websites.  You can flick through them quickly and see what you want to read more of (eg, stuff from this website) and what articles or posts you aren’t interested in.  I’ve found that it’s a serious time-saver and helps me skip to the things I really care about without wading through lots of things I don’t.

There!  That wasn’t too hard, was it?  Or…

7.  Ask Thalia or Brent or Nathaniel or someone else who is internet-savvy to do this all for you!  It’ll take them about 3.5 minutes :).

I’d love to hear how you find it after a week or so of trialling it.

Tags:   internet · recipe · RSS feeds2 Comments