Semantically driven

How using Google Reader can save you time and give you a kickass, dynamic blogroll

Written on March 27, 2007 by Jen at Semantically driven

Filed Under: Weblogs

I recently read a blog post called ‘101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle‘ post over at I help you blog. I thought out of the 101 great ideas there must be something there I could do that I could get inspiration from to write about and I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. This post falls under a couple of the 101 categories, but mainly 65.

For a couple of months now I’ve been using Google Reader to keep up with my weblog reading (thanks to TheZeroBoss). I found I didn’t really add many links to my own, old, Typepad Blogroll here and plowing through them every day was tiresome because some are only updated weekly. Flicking to a blog that hasn’t been updated every day wastes half a minute of my time. Times this by 10 for the amount of blogs that weren’t updated regularly and times it by 5 for the days of the week that I’d check them, this adds up and like most of us I’ve got precious little time to waste.

I’d also tried subscribing to RSS feeds in other ways I can’t even remember now because those experiences were so unsuccessful but I could see it was a good way to go because I’d rather the content come to me once I’d asked it to, rather than me have to go to it, which is why RSS feeds are so useful. I also like the full post to show up in the feed reader. This is an option you can setup in your blog. For those that think people might not visit your blog if you have the whole content of the blog post, this is not always true. In fact if only an excerpt shows, I won’t always click on the link to see the whole blog post.

Getting started on Google Reader

I don’t really need to go into this because Google themselves have written about this, but you need to get a Google account if you haven’t already, then start subscribing to feeds.

Subscribing to feeds

I subscribed to all the feeds of the blogs that were in my blogroll. To my surprise though, some blogs don’t have an RSS feed. This means I have to manually remember to read them.

I’d suggest getting a Feedburner feed and putting that feed on your weblog. Information about that is at Feedburner. If you’re into statistics this is the ideal way to see roughly who’s subscribing to and reading your blog, and it makes it a whole lot easier for people to click on this link in your weblog and subscribe using their feed reader of choice, in my case Google Reader.

If this isn’t up your alley, your blog software should have an facility to add a subscribe to this blog option. I know Typepad does.

To actually subscribe to feeds, the Firefox web browser is the easiest (in my opinion). Opening Google Reader in Firefox gives you a nifty little option to drag a Subscribe button onto the Toolbar. See the diagram below in the blue Tips and tricks box on the right.

Once you have dragged this to the Firefox toolbar, you will be able to click on this when you’re viewing a website you want to subscribe to. If a website does not have a feed it will let you know. (I’m not sure if this will show for the first time for every one if it hasn’t been selected already.)

Using Google Reader and managing your feeds

You can categorise your feeds into folders. You’ll see I’ve got dailies, web, and blogs folders setup in the blue column on the left. I think once this all gets a bit bigger I will split up the dailies.

When you’ve subscribed to a feed you can select the Feed settings dropdown menu at the top to put this feed into a folder and/or make a new folder. This helps to categorise your feeds and is useful with the more feeds you subscribe to.

The thing I like about Google Reader is that it shows me what I’ve read and what I haven’t so I can check in whenever I get a chance and immediately see that the bold items are the ones I haven’t read. You can either mark them as read, or if you scroll down the feed item it automatically marks itself as unread.

It’s also possible to select the little star to the left of each feed heading to bookmark it. I do this if I like a particular post and want to come back to it.

But the great thing about Google Reader is being able to share your favourite posts which is what I’ve done on my blog. It’s replaced my static list of Blogs I read and is now showing my 10 favourite items which will change as I add new shared items.

How to share your favourite feeds on your blog

When you’re reading a feed you can select ‘Share’ at the bottom as per this diagram.

Once you’ve got a few items you want to share as a blogroll, select Shared items on the left.

There are a number of ways to share but to share them on your blog, select the ‘Put a clip on your site or blog’ option.

You can then configure how you want this to look on your blog. I’m not too happy with this. I would like to be able to choose font sizes and colours but for now it looks like I have to stick with the defaults.
UPDATE: Read the first comment from Google below in regards to this. I also changed mine to have no colour scheme and it’s picked up the styles from my blog. Much better for me.

You will have to copy the HTML snippet from the bottom left hand box in the window above into your blog. This will be different for all blog platforms but for Typepad, I made a new note Typelist.

I now have my favourites listed in my blog so that everytime I share something in Google reader, my blogroll will automatically update. Hopefully this will make my blog sizzle that little bit more.

Have questions? Need help?

If anyone has any questions about this, or if there’s any way I can help set you up, then please ask away. I might be able to add to this, or just help via email.

Random Posts

• Things that scare me (4)
• How to combine a career and a kid and stay sane – Part 2 (5)
• The day after yesterday (0)
• Just Disgusting (8)
• Monday is the best day to have off…. (0)