It’s Friday, and that means the announcement of Beth’s Weekly Book Giveaway. GLORIA, if you write me between now and Monday morning at bethkery@aol.com, I will send you a copy of BOTH Mistletoe and Moonlight and Dirty!

You may have noticed that prizes go unclaimed occasionally at blogs. :) Luckily, Natasha is here to tell you how you can keep track of all your favorite blogs with a few clicks. My huge thanks to Natasha for putting together this easy to use article for using Google Reader. Hope you guys find it as helpful and informative as I did.

Take it away Natasha…
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Hi All! Beth asked me to write up a post for you all, after I made a comment about my love for Google Reader.

Google Reader is a web based tool that allows you to follow updates on some of your favourite sites. In order for the Reader to follow a site, it must have either a RSS or Atom feed (don’t ask me what that means! I just know a site needs it in order to follow it!). Wikipedia has a nice little write up about Google Reader here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader

To get an account, go to http://google.com/reader. If you already have a Google account, just log in. If you don’t already have one, then it should just take a few minutes to get through the process of creating one.

I use Google Reader to follow all of the blogs and websites I enjoy reading. I am following author blogs, review sites, crafty people, local news stations, and others. Whenever there is a new update, it appears in my subscription feed. Many of the blogs I follow have contests, and that is how this post came to be. In my comment to Beth, I said:

What did I mean by this? Well, it means that I was notified in Google Reader, as soon as Beth posted who the winner was to last week’s contest. The only time this doesn’t work, and you need to remember to go back and check, is when a blogger modifies a post instead of making a new one.
So, this is what Google Reader looks like:

Here is a quick explanation of the sections I have numbered in the picture.

1. This is where you add a subscription.

2. These are new items in your feed.

3. Here, you will see the subscriptions I am subscribed to. I currently have it set to show only UNREAD items. You can set it so that it shows all of your subscriptions.

4. This is a list of YOUR recent activity. Items that I have *Starred* (Basically I like this post, and want to be able to find it later), items I have shared with my contacts, recently read, etc.You can also see here that I have put all of my items into different folders. I have Books, Craft, Cute, Food, Learning, News, Toronto, etc. You can create as many as you want, and organize any way you want.

So, how do you know if you can follow a certain site or blog? Well, there are a couple of ways to check. When I first started using a reader, I would just grab a URL and see if I could follow it. Later I discovered that if a site has this symbol: it was followable. You can find this on the address bar of your web browser.

(Side note: sometimes, even if a site doesn’t have that symbol, you can still follow it)
You can then copy and paste the URL into the “Add a Subscription” button in Google Reader itself. Once you have done that, you can select the folder you want to place it in. At the bottom of the Feed settings drop down, there is an option for New folder, if you need to add another folder you don’t already have.

Other things you will see on this page:
Mark all as read ““ Sometimes, it just gets to be too much, and you have 100′s of unread posts… and you just need to make the cut. Mark all as read, will do exactly that, mark the post as having read it.

Previous item/Next item ““ This allows you to jump posts

I think I will leave it at that. Those are the basics (I think!). If you have any questions, just leave a comment and I will be around to answer them.

Natasha A.