[reformat: nerd] Why Do I Care?

OK, so you may be asking yourself, "What is blogging all about and why do I care?"  If you come to a satisfactory answer to that, your next question might be "Ok, now what?"

I will try to answer both of those questions for you.

A blog is basically a web site.  Most blogs are run by a single person or a small group of people.  Some blogs are targeted towards a single interest (programming, digital photography, beanie babies, whatever) and some are more rambling in scope (this one for example).

The twist comes when you introduce syndication into the mix.  Syndication allows you to use a program (a news aggregator) to keep track of multiple blogs without having to go to the website every time you want to see if they have added new content.  You simply add as many blog feeds (RSS, ATOM, etc) to your program and it will periodically check for and download new postings.  Very convenient.

The news reader that I use is called RSS Bandit, but there are many out there.  Some are simply web-based (Bloglines), some are stand-alone apps ( RSS Bandit, FeedDemon) some are browser plug-ins (OnFolio, Pluck) and some are integrated into Outlook ( NewsGator).

RSS Bandit is free.  I don't know about the others.

Once you have an aggregator, you need to add some feeds to it.  I subscribe to feeds for all sorts of things.

• Cars
• Gadgets
• Mark Cuban
• Life Hacks
• Mind Hacks
• Programming (I'll spare you the links)
• Tuner Tricks

There are blogs out there for just about anything.  When you browse to the blog's website, you'll want to look for a link that says "syndicate", "RSS", "ATOM" "feed" or something like that.  Copy that link into your aggregator.  Lather, rinse, slack off.

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Posted by Paul to reformat: nerd at 4/4/2005 10:06:00 AM