Google Magic & My Blog Finds

My Blog Finds

In my continuing effort to improve my blog and make it a source of valuable and helpful resources, I am excited to announce another new feature. If you already looked left, you noticed my new “Blogging Around” section which contains site news and other interesting stuff. Now if you look below that section, you will see yet another new section: “My Blog Finds”.

I’m sure you might think, “What’s the big deal? You already did the same thing with your “Blogging Around” section, didn’t you?” Let me explain. The “Blogging Around” section has to be manually edited by my editor and personal assistant (yours truly). This other section is automatically updated by my new editing team (Google Reader with the help of WordPress.Com).

A Little Google Magic

Before I continue my post here, let me stop and talk about Google Reader. For a while now I have been meaning to try using a feed reader. I enjoy hopping around to other blogs, and reading the great stuff that’s out there. But it can take a lot of time. And there are always blogs you don’t get too.

Feed readers, like Google Reader and Bloglines, promise to help. You simply add feeds from the blogs you want to track, and these sites will bring everything into one place. I have experimented with Bloglines, but just wasn’t happy with it. So I didn’t have great hopes for Google Reader, either.

I was pleasantly surprised, though, when I finally tried out Google Reader. “Magic” is the word that comes to mind. It is simple to add feeds (it will recognize them automatically, just copy the web address or URL from the blogs you want to add), and it is great to read them in the program. Almost all the pictures show up and the reading experience is great.

The features it offers make blogging easy. You can add a “yellow star” to any post to remember to go back and read it or blog about it later. Also, by clicking one time you can have the blog post you’re reading open up in a new window, in case you want to comment or something. You can also click “share” (at the bottom of the post) to add that post to your shared items page. And this feature is what makes it so easy to make your own “blog finds” feature.

Add Your Own “Blog Finds” Feature

I like the feature so much, I want to help you other bloggers add it as well. First, sign up for a free Google account and join Google Reader (its also free). Then, simply add subscriptions to your Google Reader, and click “share” on the posts you want to share. Then in the top left of your Google Reader home page, you will see a link to “Shared Items”. Click on that link and you will see all the posts you’ve shared, recently. But that’s not all. You will also see a fixed URL which will link to that page, as well as a link which says “feed”. The feed is for your shared list. As your shared list updates (by you selecting new posts to share), those posts are sent to your feed.

Then for those using Blogger, there is a button you can press which makes it easy to add a “Blog Finds” box to your blog, which contains your latest shared posts. And for you WordPress guys (the smart ones!!), just copy the link to your feed (located on your shared items page), and use an RSS Feed widget (in your presentation / side-bar widgets section from your dashboard). It’s that simple.

Thanks, Google Reader for sharing some blog magic. I hope you all appreciate my blog finds and start sharing yours. And I know you will find that Google Reader will make your blogging and blog-reading much easier, faster, and better!

For more help with this, check out Google Reader’s excellent help section.