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If you’ve been online for any length of time, you’ll have noticed there’s a heck of a lot of information available on the internet! Whether you want to trace your ancestors, learn how to eat more healthily – or find out how to market your small business online – there are more blog posts written about every subject imaginable than you will ever have time to read in a lifetime, let alone a normal busy day.
At the same time, you don’t want to miss important information you need to know. I’d like to share a couple of tools I find really useful to help me stay on top of my own online reading list.
When I first started subscribing to blogs a few years ago, I didn’t know what RSS was or how it worked – so I used to fill in my email address and have the latest post delivered to my inbox. As time has passed, I’ve become more protective over my inbox and find it an inefficient way to handle reading matter as it gets mixed up with all the other emails.
Using the RSS feed, I use Google Reader to gather all the latest posts from all the blogs I subscribe to. While there are many other readers available, I’ve only ever used Google and find it very efficient. As part of my iGoogle home page, I have a Google Reader widget so can see as soon as a new blog post is published.
As with emails, I only read posts a couple of times each day which is usually enough to stay on top of the number of incoming information. Some posts capture my attention and warrant re-reading or studying in greater detail. So as not to ‘lose’ a post, I click on the Star symbol which is beside the heading of every post.
If I’m not in Google Reader, or I find a website (or blog) that bears further exploring, I use an service called ReadItLater which is an AddOn to the Firefox brower – although it works equally well with other browsers, iPhones etc.
All you do is click on the ReadItLater symbol (either when you’re on the blog, website or in Google Reader) and the link address is saved in your ReadItLater list. And once you’ve read it, you simply click the symbol again to remove it from the list.
Both these (free) tools help me to organise the many blogs I subscribe to and ensure I don’t miss anything important to my business!
