Feeds. Save time and read more
Your wordpress.com blog has a feed. It’s at http://your-username.wordpress.com/feed
Your Blog Stats show who has actually come to your page.
Your Feed Stats show those who have not come to the page but have still read what you have written. They might also have read the comments too.
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Have you ever clicked through to several blogs only to find they haven’t written anything?
Has the opposite happened where you find there is so much to read?
Have you ever wondered what else there is to read in different blogs if only you could find them?
Maybe you have a slow line and getting information takes too long?
If any of the above are true, you should get a feed reader.
Feed readers are easy to use and will save you lots of time. Most are also free.
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You give a feed reader a feed address. Every hour (you can set that time) it checks that feed address. If there is a new post, the feed reader grabs that post. If not nothing happens. All you do is then read your feed reader. It’s like every hour you open a browser window to every site you like to read - that’s a lot of opening and closing windows and you have no idea if something new will be there to read. You would soon tire of doing that. But a feed reader is checking like that every hour. This saves you time because if there is nothing in the feed there is nothing on the site. If that site has a nice design you can still go look at it but equally you can save time by not going.
All this saved time now means you can read more - by using the feed reader.
Examples:
http://www.britishblogs.co.uk is an aggregator for British blogs. It collects the feeds of dozens of registered blogs, and it then produces a feed. Subscribing to that feed means you get to read lots of blogs from all over Britain - and all through one feed.
http://planet.wordpress.org aggregates lots of WordPress related news and information
Try searching for your state / province / country and ‘blog’ ‘ aggregator’ ‘feeds’
You could also get a daily comic strip: http://www.comics.com
Most news and sports organisations produce feeds too.
More examples:
If you are particularly interested in dolphins and you’d like to see what is being said by others. This Blogdigger link for dolphins shows you what is being said today about dolphins by other bloggers. At the top right of that page it has Subscribe options. Get that into a feedreader and then anytime Blogdigger finds a blog entry with dolphins in - you’ll know about it.
You could use Feedster - this search is for Marilyn Monroe - or Technorati (you need to join to get a search feed). There are several other services you can use. It gives you constant searching of thousands of blogs on whatever topics you want.
It’s a bit like the tags page here at wordpress.com - but it covers everywhere. You can even get the feed for tags used here - check the bottom of a tag page for the feed.
And it all comes to you - create the feed once and the information will pour in without you having to do any more work.
And nearly all readers come with a default set of feeds so you instantly start to see how things work.
Types of feed reader
Web-based or Desktop. One is a website/webpage you log into to read your feeds. The other is a program on your computer. Each have their good and bad points.
Where to get feed readers?
Before you look at readers, be prepared to take some time finding a reader that works for you. They all work slightly differently, they all look different and some need other programs to work (such as Microsoft .NET framework). If you don’t like one, remove it and try another - most are completely free to use.
A comprehensive list of feed readers is here: http://www.newsonfeeds.com/faq/aggregators
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