Google Reader Introduction With Tips

Google Reader is one of my favorite RSS read­ers.  It is the online RSS reader for me.  I also use a stand alone RSS reader, but Google Reader is by far my favorite. After using Google Reader for a while, I real­ized not every­one uses Google Reader, and those that do, do not really use to its poten­tial. This guide is going to show you a cou­ple of cool tips and tricks that can help you get more out of Google Reader, and maybe tran­si­tion you from offline read­ers to online.

What is Google Reader?

Google Reader is Google’s Web-Based RSS reader.  You can sub­scribe to feeds, and add them to your Google RSS reader.  This lets you view your favorite web­sites all from within the same page.  One visit, hun­dreds of sites.

How Do I Get It?

Login to your Google Account (if you do not have one, sign up here).  At the top you will see Reader, click that link and you will be taken to your home page.

How Do I Add A Feed?

Click the Add a sub­scrip­tion but­ton and type in the URL for the feed. You can do so by vis­it­ing a web­site, search­ing for its RSS feed, and right-clicking that link and choos­ing copy link, or click the RSS but­ton and copy and paste the address. For this exam­ple I’m going to add Digg’s tech­nol­ogy feed which is: http://digg.com/rss/containertechnology.xml You can also add http://feeds.feedburner.com/enlightenedwebmastery

Share Your Notes

One inter­est­ing fea­ture of Google Reader is the abil­ity to share your notes. When you’re read­ing a feed, you can click “share with note” and when you do, you can type in a quick note. Once you do that, peo­ple  you have setup to share your feeds with will see your notes, and you also have your own URL that you can go to or your friends can go to and they can see your notes (I pre­fer to Twit­ter with a quick com­ment but with Google Reader you can leave a much longer note).

Star Your Favorite Posts

My favorite fea­ture, and most used is star­ing inter­est­ing posts.  With this I can eas­ily access my favorite reads.  You do this by click­ing the Add Star but­ton and choos­ing Starred items from your main menu list. If you enjoy orga­niz­ing your stuff this way, you can get even more gran­u­lar by adding tags.  Add a tag by click­ing Add Tags, and give it a cou­ple of tags, like tech, word­press, rss and then when you need to read your posts that you enjoyed that you tagged RSS, just click the RSS tag.

Find­ing Feeds Using Keywords

You can find feeds by key­word by click­ing Browse for stuff, then under Search & browse type in some­thing you want to find more of. For this exam­ple I used apple, and you can see AppleIn­sider, they have 62,465 sub­scribers in Google Reader right now, and what’s best is, you can see the aver­age amount of posts per week.  Right now for AppleIn­sider that’s 28.7 a week which is about 4 times a day. You can use this to your advantage.

If you want to find a new source for news, you can choose one with a lot of updates, or you can choose one that has very lit­tle updates. If you check out MacNN, you will see they have 157 posts per week, Yikes! thats over 20 posts a day! This is a very use­ful fea­ture, as it lets you know up front if it is a busy feed or not.  I have a few feeds that get updated a lot, but I do not actu­ally read them all.  The ones who have 20 or less, I tend to keep up with.

Essen­tial Soft­ware For Inter­act­ing With Google Reader

Here are a few use­ful pieces of soft­ware you can use to fur­ther enjoy your RSS feeds. Google Reader Noti­fier Fire­Fox Exten­sions http://www.markdbd.com/proyectos/google_reader_notifier/ This won­der­ful plug-in allows you to see how many unread items you have in your Google Reader account.

If you use a mac, you might want to try out this nifty tool: Reader Noti­fier, this allows you to see if you got any new feeds to read, and you can see them in your menu bar (along with a num­ber). http://troelsbay.eu/software/reader Win­dows users can use the Google Reader Noti­fier found here: http://www.braindotty.com/google-reader-notifier/ This pro­gram sits in your sys­tem tray and lets you see if you have any unread items.

Using Google Reader On Your Phone or PDA

If you want to check your Google Reader feeds on your phone, put in the fol­low­ing address: http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/

Con­clu­sion

Google Reader is an amaz­ing appli­ca­tion, I encour­age you to check it out, if you do not need really advanced and spe­cific func­tions, you can’t do bet­ter than Google Reader.  The fact that every­thing is tied to one account, makes life that much sim­pler.  Bot­tom line? I highly rec­om­mend Google Reader. If you want to learn more about RSS check out this post ->  What is RSS and How Do I Use It? and be sure to sub­scribe to my feed so you can keep up to date. Talk  soon.

Tagged as: Google Reader, RSS