I *Heart* Google Reader

Blogroll Efficiency

When I was trying to figure out how to possibly incorporate my MANY feeds into a manageable blogroll here, I remembered reading a post by Sue Waters some months ago that explained how to do this really nicely straight through Google Reader. Well, I finally dug back through my backlog and found the post and am just amazed at how wonderful this feature is.

I first used it to create a blogroll for This Mommy Gig with the many new mommy blogs I’ve come across and then decided it was way past time to include a blogroll on this site. Due to the number of feeds that I have in my reader (no, I don’t read every feed every day, but I like having them all there for when I need reading on a particular topic or have extra reading time), I’ve actually created a page here for the various categories of blogs that I read, with a separate blogroll for each category. Remember, I created these categories for the way MY brain works, you might have done it differently!

Check out the new blogrolls!

These are still in process, so if you’re outraged that you’re not on them, throw in a note in the comments, but I probably just haven’t categorized your blog in Google Reader yet. I have a slight issue with email subscribing to some blogs and then forgetting to add them to Google Reader, whoops!

The glory of using Google Reader to create the blogroll is that you can manage your list of blogs on your site directly from Google Reader. So, when I find a new education/busines/social media/mommy blog that I’d like to subscribe to, I simply add it to the appropriate category in Google Reader and it automatically adds it to my blogroll on my site(s). This takes care of my problem that I have of not keeping a current blogroll, as it’s really hard to remember to update the listings on every site. Read Sue’s post for instructions on how to actually do create your blogroll in Google Reader - there’s no point in reinventing the wheel, she does a great job of explaining it!

Subscribe Easily Using Firefox

Another handy thing I love about Google Reader is the Subscribe button I added to my Firefox toolbar. I don’t ever have to search for a feed button on a new site that I find, I just click my subscribe button and it takes the feed directly to Google Reader where I can confirm the subscription and add it to the appropriate folder for my blogrolls.

As shown below, you can find this feature in Google Reader under Settings, then Goodies. I didn’t show the entire page because it’s pretty self-explanatory once you get there.

Sharing to Twitter From Google Reader

The last Google Reader greatness for today is the ability to share posts directly from Google Reader into your twitter stream. I was cautioned by a twitter-follower that some people overuse this ability, but given my opinion on twitter rules, I didn’t make too much of that. To add this feature to your Google Reader, you have to install the Greasemonkey Firefox extension and then add the appropriate script. Here are the resources needed for the process:

The forgotten Milk - How to share articles from Google Reader to twitter
Greasemonkey
Firefox

Once you have the script installed, it’s as easy to share a post/article to twitter as it is to star it or add it with your shared list.

So, after all of that, you can see why I’m reluctant to consider ever using another aggregator!

Note: I’m currently weeding through and categorizing all of my feeds, so the lists will be changing a lot soon. Come back and visit again!

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