Blogs for Beginners – Be a Follower

As I sat here writing my thesis this afternoon, my mind began to wonder (as it’s apt to do when I force myself to do things for long periods of time), and I started wondering how many people are frequent blog readers. Personally, I begin everyday checking in to see if anyone has put some new information out there for me to ingest (I’m an information-addict). But how many other people do something similar? Sure, people check their Facebook to see how their friend’s date went, or check in on Twitter to find out what Ashton Kutcher is eating for breakfast, but what about starting the day learning something new and related to your work/hobby?

Have spring fever but stuck inside? Blogs may be the answer!

This week I thought I’d put together a little primer on blogs so that those not as familiar with what’s out there can start to dive in!

Today I’ll give the basics about subscribing to blogs and different ways to read them, and then later this week I’ll share with you some of my must-reads.

So you’ve found a blog which you find insightful/entertaining/informative/relative to your work or hobby/all of the above (Biodiversity in Focus Blog..*cough*cough* :D) and want to check back again in the future to see what else they have to say? You could simply bookmark the website and check back day in and day out to see if there’s been something new posted. Sound like a lot of work? Well instead you can take advantage of the work that some smart internet programmer did and use RSS feeds. RSS is the internet’s version of a subscription, and which helps deliver new content to you whenever it’s made available!

Find this symbol and click to subscribe to a blog

The easiest way to get started is to use the built-in RSS reader provided by your internet browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc). To do that, all you need to do is click on the symbol above and voila, your internet browser will create a special bookmark that lets you see when new items are posted! Some bloggers like to be creative, so if you don’t see the simple square, look for variations on the symbol (like the fly abdomen at the top of this page)!

But what happens when you start subscribing to multiple blogs? Personally I put them all into book mark folders that I can scroll through and check each morning, but another option is a feed aggregator like Google Reader. All you need to do is input the web address for the blog, and the reader will update whenever there is a new blog post. This way you can check a single web page and have all the new posts ready for you to read!

The final alternative is to sign up for email updates. This is as simple as it sounds, where the blog will automatically email you when a new article is posted. I get enough junk mail as it is, but some people might prefer the blog coming to them rather than them going to the blog (the ultimate digital power struggle). Note that not all blogs have this feature (including BiF… I’m working on it), but most blogs do have RSS feeds (or its cousin Atom).

So there you have it, an intro to subscribing to blogs! I encourage you to test out your new skill and subscribe to this blog so you’ll know when I share some of my favourite blogs in my next post!