
My friend Shirley, changed my life a few weeks back. She turned me on to a handy internet utility called Google Reader. (It’s free!) Before being hipped, I lived in the internet Dark Ages; I had dozens & dozens & dozens of design, food, tech & culture Blogs bookmarked, but it was always an every day reminder and all day commitment to stay on top of checking each & every one of them for updates to get my inspirational fix.
In steps the aforementioned Google Reader, and now, I have all of the sites I want to follow in one handy place.
In the image above, note on the left side, there are titles of the sites in my “subscriptions”. The light blue means that site hasn’t updated since I last viewed it. The dark blue means it has updated since my last view session, and tells me with how many posts. I can click on the entire folder (such as DOE Family) as in my above example, to see all updates within that particular folder, or I can click on only individual websites. Whatever you click on, the update will appear on the right side and you simply keep scrolling down until you’ve caught up.
Add new sites at any time, “unsubscribe” when you want to move on, or use the title of the site to go directly to the site to view. Time is precious and any time I find a tool in efficiency, my insides tingle. This is one of my top 2 of the year, thus far…Very intuitive to use (I didn’t need a tutorial to figure it out!) and bonus-it can be accessed from any computer.