Reading Site Feeds through Google Reader

With the increase in the usage of the Internet as a medium for communication, more and more people lean on it for information. With so much information out there, that is, so much interesting websites we want to visit, we usually do not have time to browse and take a look at each page everyday.

Google Reader is a free web tool for reading feeds from sites we subscribe to through the use of RSS feeds. RSS feeds are just like “summaries” of the contents a page has. (See the image below for a screenshot.)

Google Reader is like a scrapbook of your hand-picked sites, where you be updated of the newly-posted entries your favorite sites offer. The interface is very similar to Gmail – professional and clean.

Adding Feeds
In order to use the reader, you must first add feeds to it through the Add Subscription link. Finding Feeds are relatively simple as they are usually indicated by this sign .

Reading and Organizing Feeds
Clicking the Feed name on the lower left part of the screen allows you to view the contents of the feed. As you scroll through each entry, Google Reader automatically updates the number of unread entries. It also logs statistics on how much you read from your subscriptions, among others. You can have a look at it on the Trends link. As with Gmail, you can also mark specific items with a Star. You can also share entries/news items to your friends and colleagues. Organizing feeds is also easy. Just click on the Manage subscriptions link, and there you can add or remove categories and place the feeds accordingly to each category.

Google Reader is a versatile RSS reader. A good thing about it is it’s web-based. As long as you have an internet connection, you will be able to access your feeds anywhere. That’s it.

To learn more about
Google Reader – http://www.google.com/reader
RSS Feeds (Wikipedia) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

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Happy reading!