Just a quick blog post about one of the most useful websites around, and one I check in excess of 5 times a day (and that isn’t some form of social network), that is Google Reader. Google reader simply reads Atom and RSS feeds and collects them all in one place.
So if you subscribe to a large number of blogs and/or (in my case) some web comics, then you know that it can be a pain to keep checking all the different websites. So go to the Google Reader website and click ‘Add a subscription’ to get started.
You can directly enter the feed URL, if you know it, or you can search for something that you might be interested in. That is it really, hopefully the advantage of this is obvious, especially if there are a lot of feeds you follow regularly.
It is worth noting three extra features which are excellent. Firstly, there is an option to view the articles offline, it can download upto 2000 articles at a time. Secondly there is a Google Reader extension for Chrome which will automatically check Google Reader for you, provide notifications when you have unread messages and provide direct links to the particular article. Finally you can use Google Reader Play in the same way as StumbleUpon. It works in much the same way as StumbleUpon, Google calculates what it thinks you would like and you can ‘like’ which ones you do indeed enjoy to improve the search.