Posted by JC at
Living in this digital age has brought about so much information online. I read everything online basically (except for school textbooks). There are so many sites to visit and new things to be posted everyday. There is so much to take in and so little time to do so.
A couple of weeks ago I had about 15 sites that I would visit at least once a day. Besides Slickdeals, there were several blogs I would check and then news sites and a few others. Checking all those sites takes forever. The biggest pain is that half the time there isn't anything new on the sites (especially on people's blogs), so that means that I was just wasting time. About this time I was doing a project for work with Google Alerts. Somehow I came across this awesome service that Google offers: Google Reader!
If you look at the screenshot above, you will see that I have all of my sites divided by category on the bottom left and then all of the new stuff on each site shows up on the right. I can narrow down what I want to see from just "Blogs" to a single site. The nicest thing about this service is that I can visit 1 site, see everything that is new, and move on.
As a quick note, the site must have an RSS feed. For blogs, the blog must be public or you won't be able to connect to the RSS feed. Lastly, mine is all color coded, but that does not come standard with Google Reader. That is because of a nice Firefox addon, Better GReader. I know there are other similar services out there, so if you know of something better let me know. Oh yeah, it only checks for updates at most every 5 minutes, but may check less frequently depending on the RSS settings of the site it is checking. You have no control over that though. Check it out. It is definitely worth your time.
