Helpful Blog reading tips

Being new to blogging, and having a few comments about the time it takes to keep up with all the blogs one might want to read, or the difficulty of doing so, I post this as a help to those who can use it. Many long-time bloggers and blog readers probably already know this stuff, but us newbies can probably use it!

I did know there were "feed readers" available to give you a one-stop shop for all your "syndicated" blogs. Programs like RSS Point make it pretty easy to keep up to date with blogs by giving you one place to go where all the feeds are aggregated. Many blogs (all of them at blogspot.com) have the option of an "Atom" feed, which these programs will read and bring all the blogs' new messages into one prorgam, much like opennig your email program and bringing in all your mail.

What I didn't know, but I just found out last week through poking around, is that the Mozilla programs Thunderbird (for email) and Firefox (for web browsing) both offer options to help you keep track of the blogs you like to read.

In Firefox, there are "live bookmarks." If you go to the web page of a blog that is syndicated (rss or atom feed), on the far right of the address box is an orange symbol. Clicking on the orange symbol brings up the "Add live bookmark" dialog where you can specify where in your bookmarks hierarchy to place the blog's bookmark. The next time you click "Bookmarks" and navigate to where you stored the bookmark for that blog, instead of a regular bookmark, you'll see a folder with the blog's name. Moving to that folder reveals every post on the blog as a bookmark, so if there are new items you haven't read before, just click them and you're on your way to reading the new entry.

In Thunderbird you can add RSS/Atom feeds as if they were another set of email folders. Click Tools, then Account Settings, then the Add Account button. Select "RSS News and Blogs" on the first page of the wizard, click next, give the account a name which will be the name at the head of the folder list for the feeds, and finish the wizard. Then, to add blogs to these folders, click the head of the folder list you just created (default is "News & Blogs"), click "Manage Subscriptions" in the right pane and a new box opens. Click the add button to add a feed. All the feeds at blogspot.com look like this:
http://schreibenvonschreiber.blogspot.com/atom.xml
It's the blog's home page with "/atom.xml" appended to the end. Enter that info into the "Feed URL" box and click OK and the program will go find it and add it to your folder list.

After you go through the folders and mark all the already read messages as read, when you come back tomorrow and want to see if there is new content in the blogs you are keeping track of, click on "News & Blogs" or whatever you named the head folder, and click the "Get mail" button. The feeds will be checked and all new blog entries will be downloaded to your computer.

I found these options to be helpful in gathering all the reading into one convenient spot for me to read. I hope the info is helpful to some other folks.