This is life changing stuff – like getting your first cell phone, using TiVo, finding Hulu (you mean I don’t have to plan my week around 30Rock?), or switching to Diet Dr. Pepper.
This may be preaching to the choir but . . .
I think one of the best ways to develop as a leader is by subscribing to and reading blogs. You won’t grow as a leader if you’re not being exposed to new ideas and great leaders. And there’s no quicker way than to read great blogs. They’re short and to the point – my favorite kind of reading.
For those of you who don’t know, I’ll explain below how (and why) to subscribe to blogs.
I personally subscribe to and read weekly around 75 blogs - I would never have time to check all those blogs independently, but now I have them in one big list that I can check when I have time and that tells me, for instance, that Fast Company has 101 new posts that I have not read (they post A LOT!).
Have you ever thought, “I sure wish I didn’t have to keep going back to my favorite blogs to see if they’ve updated it. Wouldn’t it be amazing if, by some sort of magic, someone could tell me when they’ve put up new posts?”
Well, your dreams can become a reality thanks to the magic of RSS feeds.
Using Google Reader or the built in Feed readers in your internet browser, you can:
- Have all your favorite blogs listed in one place
- Know when (and how many times) each blog gets updated
For some of you this may be old hat, something you’ve been doing since the early days of internets, or at least since late 2007.
But here are instructions on how to subscribe to blogs:
- There are several ways to subscribe to a blog. The easiest is to just click on the RSS symbol at the top right of your browser then click on “subscribe to this feed”. I know in Firefox (which, for Windows users, is a far better browser than Internet Explorer and is free; for Macs, you can use Safari or Firefox) it gives the option of “subscribe to this feed using”. I would personally pick Google from the list. I’m sure all of the options work great but Google is probably the most popular/easiest. If you don’t have a Google account, it will prompt you to sign up for a free Google Reader account. Once you’ve signed up with Google Reader, you can either add new blogs by clicking on the RSS symbol when you are on that blog or you can do it manually through Google Reader. Just log into Google Reader and midway down the left side it will have an option to “add subscription”. Click on that and you can type in the name of the blog you want to subscribe to. Then just bookmark Google Reader and you can click on that bookmark when you want to go look at all your blogs!
Hope that makes sense! Leave a comment if you want further explanation or are thoroughly confused.
photo courtesy of HiMY SYeD / photopia via Flickr
