Subscribe to Blogs

I venture to guess that most people reading my blog don’t subscribe to it. This isn’t a post asking for everybody to subscribe to picklewagon. But I did want to point out something that most, if not all, blogs have that will make your life easier.

Behind the scenes of blogs exists a technology called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Using RSS, a reader can subscribe to a feed. In other words, if I find a blog I enjoy reading, I can subscribe to it using a blog reader application (online or desktop app).

Suppose you subscribe to my blog. That would mean you would not have to return to my blog every day or week to see if I have updated it. The application you used to subscribe would simply know because of RSS. Using this technology, my good friend Shane will not have to visit his entire blogroll each day to see if each blog has been updated. He simply will need to us his reader to see if they have been updated. These readers really magnify the power of blogs.

Another word for this software is an aggregator. You can read more on aggregators on Wikipedia. There are a lot of different aggregators available-either desktop or online. I prefer online because I read them on multiple computers.

I am currently using Google Reader. They have made it very easy to look at all of my feeds. Just last week they made some really nice enhancements. (Google Reader does require a Google account. If you have problems setting one up let me know.) I have also tried Bloglines and Newsgator and various desktop apps. A lot of email clients also support RSS feeds.
Once you pick your aggregator, you will need to subscribe to feeds. Most aggregators allow you to simply type the blog address and then the app auto-discovers the blogs feed address. Or you can find a link to the feed and copy it into the aggregator.

On Picklewagon, you can find the subscribe box and copy the links. I have to feeds setup, one for just posts and one for comments. It is also possible to subscribe to categories in my blog. The possibilities are endless with RSS.

I invite you to add my blog to your aggregator. If you don’t have one setup, please get one. It will save you a lot of time and you will enjoy reading blogs even more than you do now. It is the only way I do it.

Please let me know if you have further questions. I will explore other things that are possible using RSS in future posts.