Feed Readers Galore at The Copeland Ramblings

Over the last year and a half that we’ve had our blog we’ve enjoyed not only sharing our lives with others, but also keeping up with our friends on their blogs. We’ve even become friends with people we’ve never met through comments on our blog and been able to keep up with childhood friends while they are away at school. Everyone posts at different intervals, some quite often, some weekly and some not so often. There’s nothing wrong with that but it gets hard to remember everyone’s blog much less go there every so often and check to see if they have posted.

A neat solution to this problem is called feed. I won’t get into technical details (you can read up on it here if you want) but feed is headlines sent out from websites to one place that you go to. So instead of checking 10 different blogs to see if there have been any new posts, you just go to your feed reader to check if any new posts have been sent to you. But it isn’t just blogs that have feed. You can get anything from comics to weather to top news stories sent to your reader.

Have you ever noticed any of these symbols on websites you visit?

These buttons link to the feed address for the site you are visiting. You can take these addresses and add them to your feed reader. How do you get a feed reader? There are plenty of free online readers. The reader that we use and recommend is Google Reader.
Other options include:

When blogs are created with blogger a feed address is created with it whether the author knows it or not. For blogger blogs the feed address is always http://blognamehere.blogspot.com/atom.xml (obviously adding the blog name to the address). An example of how feed can be used can be seen at NTMC Blogs. NTMC blogs is a directory of blogs by missionaries and students with NTMC. The feed from their blogs is used to send their headlines to NTMC Blogs. Within Google Reader you can share your reading list with others and search for feed on any topic you’d like.

We’ve had a lot of questions about feed lately so we thought we’d share our thoughts and how useful we’ve found it. Comment if you have any questions. Enjoy!

UPDATE 9/29/06 ~
Google updated its reader and also put out this short clip explaining very clear and simply what a feed reader is, check it out