Great Information!

I've mentioned RSS feeds a number of times on this blog - I thought it might be useful to explain a bit more and provide some more resources. RSS stands for "really simple syndication", and is basically a system for subscribing to blogs, much as you might use iTunes to subscribe to podcasts. Rather than having to use a browser (IE, FireFox, Safari, Chrome, etc.) to go to individual blogs and see if something is new, you can use feed reader software (also called a feed or news aggregator) to subscribe to any number of blogs, and have these served up for you to view and do more - much more.

So, first things first: which reader software to use? You can use Google Reader (www.google.com/reader) directly in a web browser window, as it's become one of the major ways of organizing, saving, and sharing your subscriptions. You'll probably find, however, that using a stand-alone program will offer benefits, even though I'll sometimes go into Google Reader itself. Opinions will of course vary, but I really like Feeddler Pro on my iPhone and Reeder on my iPad (these are my main devices for following all the blogs I track), and before that I used NetNewsWire on my Mac. Here are some suggested readers for the Mac and some suggested readers for PC.

Next, the question is what to subscribe to? I've provided for you my lists of tech blogs I follow at the right side of this blog (they're called "bundles"). You can click on the names of the individual blogs to visit these, click on preview to see the collection, or subscribe on a bundle, which is the easiest way to get a quick start. I've organized my tech blog bundles in terms of iPhone/iPad related blogs, and then more generally tech-related blogs. (If you're interested in my church-related bundles, check them out at my church-related blog: communiocate.blogspot.com.)

How did I create these bundles? That's a function within Google Reader - if you'd like to know more about how to do that, let me know in a comment.

I have also marked a number of blog entries as starred (items I think will be of future use to me) and as shared (items I think will be of interest to my tech friends). My shared list is pretty large, but there are some incredible bits of information in there, more quickly accessible than reading through the thousands of blog entries I've read through (I read, on average, about 500-700 blog entries a day). To see my shared items, see http://www.google.com/reader/shared/06701517268185061680. To subscribe to my shared items as a feed, click on http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/06701517268185061680/state/com.google/broadcast. This would in essence let you subscribe to a special feed of only those blog entries I've found of interest.

If you have further questions, or if I'm not being clear in what I'm saying, please let me know! This is an incredible source of information, and I'd love more people to have access to it.