I created a profile for my Google account because I have so many different Google related sites (Blogger, YouTube etc.) and things tied into each other that I thought I might as well have a main page to link from...more for myself than anything really but I did want to share my Google Reader page which is how I ended up getting to the create profile page...
...I've be banging on about Google Reader to a few people lately and if your wondering what all the fuss is then I will explain it in a nutshell...
There's about 20 different sites that I visit daily. Instead of having to visit each one individually Google Reader lets me view them all on a single page in this format:
All the sites I subscribe to are listed on the left hand side and then when I click each one I get a list of every new story published on that site since I last clicked in here and read the articles.
The layout of just the title of the article and the first 3-4 lines of the story is so handy because you can just scroll down quickly through all the articles and when you click on the one you want to read it opens the article in a new window on it's actual website page. So for example although there might be 300 new articles in The Telegraph today I might only want to read 10-20 of them so instead of going to their website and searching through the site for articles of interest, I can just scroll straight down through them in Reader and click what I want. Or add a "Star" to the article and then go to my Starred Items section at the top right later on and read a personal pick of the days news.
...I've be banging on about Google Reader to a few people lately and if your wondering what all the fuss is then I will explain it in a nutshell...
There's about 20 different sites that I visit daily. Instead of having to visit each one individually Google Reader lets me view them all on a single page in this format:
All the sites I subscribe to are listed on the left hand side and then when I click each one I get a list of every new story published on that site since I last clicked in here and read the articles.
The layout of just the title of the article and the first 3-4 lines of the story is so handy because you can just scroll down quickly through all the articles and when you click on the one you want to read it opens the article in a new window on it's actual website page. So for example although there might be 300 new articles in The Telegraph today I might only want to read 10-20 of them so instead of going to their website and searching through the site for articles of interest, I can just scroll straight down through them in Reader and click what I want. Or add a "Star" to the article and then go to my Starred Items section at the top right later on and read a personal pick of the days news.
BTW, to "Subscribe" to a website you just have to look for this RSS logo listed somewhere on that site:
Click on that and you will get asked which RSS Reader you would like to add it to...in this case it's the Google Reader...
I would recommend this to anyone with a google email address but if you are too lazy to set it up then here are links to my shared reader pages:
Click "View All" to open them in their Google Reader window
And that's about it really...I gotta hand it to them because I'm loving all the integration possible with the Google stuff (enough to rave about it here when I'm not on their payroll)...like when you share something on your shared page it will post it to Twitter also, or when you upload a pic in Twitter it will show on your Google profile etc.
Another of my personal favourites is having my Firefox homepage set to iGoogle:
So when I open Firefox the homepages lets me Google Chat with my friends on the left, I have the weather for Waterford, a search box for Wikipedia, a currency converter and the days headlines from a couple of sites...beautiful eh?
I'll save the talk about Google Wave for another day but if your on it you can add neilmcgrath1@googlewave.com if you like tho to be completely honest I don't have any particular use for it at the moment so I have no idea what we will do together on it that we couldn't do on normal Google Chat...
No comments:
Post a Comment