Thing #8 Week #4: RSS

Oh, the goodness of Google Reader. Reader is just one of the many good Google things that have captured my heart, but it is undoubtably the one that I use the most often. (Even now that I am blogging regularly on Blogger.)

As I mentioned when I was discussing my blogroll (which is simply a select slice of my Google Reader imported into Blogger), I follow about 20 blogs on a semi-regular basis. That was before I started following everyone's blog from 23 things. Now my RSS feed count is up to about 90.

Google Reader lets you organize your feeds into folders so I have folders for 23 things, Fun & Family, Education, Technology and Politics.

Fun & Family includes blogs of friends, ParentHacks, MSU Football Scores and Giants Scores. Sports scores are available for most pro and college teams at Totally Scored, but their site seems to be down right now. The sports scores RSS feeds are great ways to make sure that the info I want comes to me. 

Actually that's true for all of my feeds. Google Reader also has the option to either view all articles, all new articles, all of each post or just the headlines which can be expanded. I prefer to see just the headlines and only new posts, which lets me scan and read selectively. 

Also since some of the feeds like ThinkProgress have 15-20 posts per day, I love the option that allows me to "Mark all as read" when I occasionally get behind on keeping up with the news. I can read a few headlines and then just move along. That's the semi-regular part.

Google Reader interface for creating a shared/public version of your feed reader is a little clunky. It doesn't really have the look and feel of Google Reader, but you can see posts from some of the feeds I follow. 

Take a look here: http://tinyurl.com/cvuqn2