Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Feed Reader reviews

You don't really have to come to this web page to read the latest posts. All you have to do is set up to receive the "feed" from this page.

OK, OK, so now you're starting to get glassy-eyed and wondering about "feed". Well, a "feed" is the information about a posting here -- the title, date/time, and text of the post. You can access those via a "Feed Reader". Most are free.

Once you "subscribe" to a feed, your NewsReader automatically checks for new posts when you open it. Of course, you can still just check back here now and then.

cnet has reviews of several feed readers. An executive summary... if you use Internet Explorer, it looks like Pluck is a good one to try. [ Download Pluck ]

If you'd like to read blog feeds via a separate web page that collects "feeds" from different blogs for you, try the Google Reader or NewsGator.

If you are a FireFox user, you can "drag" a web address for a blog to your bookmark bar and it adds an orange "feed" icon. Clicking on that icon lets you see all current posts for that blog. Internet Explorer 7 is reported to also add this feature.

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