Bournagain

A practical point about blogging: do you know about feeds? Feeds are an easy way of keeping track of what people are writing in your favourite blogs, without actually having to visit their site. Blog posts are “syndicated” in rather the same way as international press agencies like Reuters syndicate their reports to newspapers all over the world.

To read feeds, you need a “feed reader” (you see, it’s not rocket science). They are also called rss readers or aggregators (don’t worry about what rss stands for). There are two kinds. An Internet based rss reader is a website where you set up an account for free, which enables you to group the feeds of all your favourite blogs together, and it updates automatically every time you open your account page. A good example of this is Bloglines which is one that I use and am quite happy with.

The other option is to install a feed reader as a plugin on your Internet browser. Firefox even has its own feed reading feature with “Live bookmarks” (I wouldn’t now about Internet Explorer – I have evolved The one I use is an open source thing called Sage – it’s very easy to install and read. Every now and then when I’m working at the computer, I just click on “update feeds”, and can instantly see who has written new material.