Due to a ton of questions people have asked me on twitter about RSS, I thought I would do a very short series of posts on RSS.
RSS Class
First, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. What this means is that instead of clicking each blog individually, you can choose to subscribe to a blog’s RSS feed and read it in your reader of choice.
Now that we have that really basic definition out of the way, I want to get to the meat of today’s post.
If you are anything like me, your google reader is fit to burst with a ton of posts. Maybe when you first started blogging or reading book blogs, you followed approximately 1000 blogs, before realizing that not all book blogs are created equal or to your preferences. So perhaps you went through your google reader and clicked unsubscribe to some, but to discover to your chagrin that OMG those posts ARE STILL SHOWING UP.
Yikes.
Then you discover that you have to go all the way to that person’s blog and click unfollow. Which is like a 3 step process.
Well, I have an alternative.
You could just remove Blogger followed blogs from google reader. Here’s how:
1. Open up google reader.
Google Reader
2. See all the way at the bottom where it says ‘Manage subscriptions.’ Click that.
3. In settings, click on the preferences tab.
Google Reader setting
4. Scroll down to Misc. Unclick the box that says show followed blogs from Blogger.
The advantage to doing this is that you can support someone by ‘following’ them, but not actually have to read their content if maybe you don’t have time for it, or if you feel overwhelmed by it. Plus the blog’s content will still show up in your blogger.com Blogs I’m Following Reader List, so it will be there if you want to do a quick scroll through.
Doing this will not remove blogs you follow via RSS or feedburner or via the add a subscription button at the top. FYI if you cannot find a blog’s RSS button, you can always just type in their URL in the add a subscription books and google reader will do the rest of the work for you.
The next session of RSS class will focus on Feedburner and what it can do for you.
Class is dismissed!
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What an awesome post! This really helped! Thanks!
I think this will be a wonderful class for me. I don’t really *do* computers very well, so any instruction is oh-so-fabulous. (Read: Anytime I attempt to talk about computers, my sweet husband shuts his eyes and shakes his head, but totally out of love…) That being said, I will have to re-read this again to figure it out, because it sounds very helpful and time-saving. At the moment I’m still clicking on each post to open it up. So thanks! This is wonderful!
Great advice April! I’m in the process of RSS ‘following’ instead of straight out GFC to try and manage my reader a little better.
As an added tip – you don’t have to visit individual blogs to unfollow – you can use the ‘Manage’ feature from your blogger dashboard — a few less steps and it’s easier to keep track of what you are doing.
That is a great tip Emily!
I love how willing we are in the book blogging community to share our knowledge 😀
Great information. Such a coincidence, because I was just trying to figure out how to get rid of all the blogs that I don’t visit because they don’t visit me. So this helps tremedously. And I was right on the very page for manage subscriptions. The blog angels must’ve known I needed this post today.
Thanks April! I had no idea yo could do this! I like that you still have the blogs on your blogger dashboard in case you ever want to look through their content.