A Faster More Efficient Way to Read Your Blogs

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As an active internet surfer and addict of social media, I have large collection of blogs I read almost everyday. In the last few months, due sites like Blog Engage, my blog listing grew too big. I Spent so much time just trying navigate through my bookmark system that I never could keep up with all the new articles. So I started looking for a faster more reliable way to do this. First I started with sites like Delicious and even Alltop,, but they just couldn’t meet my needs. Both are excellent sources for news and are good sources to find new sites but, both could not keep up with the speed of my reading habits.  While messing around in the Google tools section of my profile, I saw Google Reader. When Google Reader first came out, I was not all that impressed but after saving several of my favorite feeds and configure the site the way I wanted it I found that Google reader was the right tool for the job.

Google reader is an online RSS reader (aggregator) created by Google. The reader is able to read atom and RSS feeds online or offline. Google Reader can be setup so that user can assign different feeds to different folders. By doing this, the reader is not as cluttered as a basic reader would be.

How I Use Google Reader

Currently I have about 150 subscriptions that I read. Before I started using Google Reader it would take me several hours throughout the day to read them all. Once I started using Google Reader, I now read my blogs in about an hour or less if I do not comment that much.
In order for you to use Google Reader efficiently there are several things you need to do. The first is to start subscribing to all your favorite blogs. After you have a handful blogs in your reader, you need to create folders and assign the feeds to them.  For me, the easiest way to name them was to name them by subject.   I chose Design, CSS, bloggers – DoFollow, and SEO/SEM.

To create the folders, open the reader and go to settings, and then click on subscriptions. Once inside subscriptions, you should see all of your subscriptions in alphabetical order.  On the left side of the page you will see a dropdown menu for each subscription. The menu says change folders… Click on the menu button, and select new folder. A new window pops up asking you to name the folder and save. You will use these steps for each folder that you want to create.

Once the folders are setup, you can use the drop down menu to add each feed to a folder. This process is a little slow and can take a while if you have large list.  The reader also offers a bulk add feature. To use this feature, there is a check by each on the right side of the page. Start with one subject and check each feed that will go into that folder. Once you have all your feeds selected, go to the top left corner of the page and click the drop menu called more actions… and select the folder you want to add the feeds to.  Complete this process for each folder until you have all of your feeds in a folder. You will also notice that once you have selected a folder to store these feeds in you can still see those feeds on the subscription page.  Just ignore those subscriptions.

Now that you have everything setup in folders, go back to the main page, you can minimize all of your folders. Each closed folder will show how many updated posts there are. With this setup, I now go through each subject one at a time. Another reason to setup folders is that when you click on a folder, it will open all the new blog post for each feed and you can go through and read as if you were reading a long document. As you scroll post the opened post it will then tell the reader that you have read the post. You will know you have a new post because, beside each feed there will be a number and that number will change depending how many new posts there are to read. Google Reader will then add all those unread counts and put out next to the folder where the feed is being stored.

How do you use Google Reader?