How do you do that?

How do you keep up with all these blogs?

Had a friend ask me the other day, "How is it that you respond to my blog so quickly, like all the time?"

Yes, she said "like"!

That is so, like, last century, to say like!

Anyway, the answer is easy!

I stalk all of you!

Oh, oooops! Ok, that's not really the answer.

The answer is RSS! Now, I don't know how RSS works for you PC users! I do know that IE 7 supports it.

What RSS definitely does, regardless of computer platform, is save a ton of time! My email application lets me know when you have made a new entry! As much as I love you, I don't have to go to your site and see if there is something new. I am able to keep track of tons of blogs because of RSS, blogs that I might not otherwise be able to keep up with.

Let me show you how it works on the mac (and if you are a pc user and want to guide us on how to do it on the pc, let me know, I'll add your link or whatever you like).

Let's first use a good example of a blog to RSS. Everybody loves IronJenny and she posts irregularly (not that there's anything wrong with that)! If you look at her url, you will notice an RSS or icon for RSS on the right side of the url toolbar.

Click to enlarge this picture: You will see two browser windows open. The Safari browser (safari is the mac browser that comes with the mac os) window has RSS on the right side of the url tool bar and the Firefox has the RSS icon.
What you do next is click on this icon. Sometime you get a choice of RSS or Atom Feed, sometimes there are other options. My understanding is that Atom is the best choice.

(again, click on picture)
After making your choice, you have this window.
Again, I don't know about windows, but on the mac, with Safari, if you look on the choices on the right side of the web page, you will see the "Actions:" section. I chose for you (because you are special), "subscribe in mail".

And voila, I will now be updated when I check my email, anytime IronJenny updates her blog!

Here is a pic of my email client: See all the RSS items on the left side?

You may want to check your preferences!

I must admit, it is a little bit of work to initially set up! For one thing, you have to click on all the "new" entries that aren't new so that your computer is updated to what you have visited. If you go back to the picture above, you will see it shows that IronJenny has 25 new entries. Well, that's not true, I've seen them all. So yes, I had to click on them but once that is done, I am set. I can keep up with all of you without taking the time to visit each site.

I highly recommend it.