Public Service Announcements

Here’s a message specifically for all my friends over at HomeschoolBlogger (but for other bloggers, too). Please turn on your RSS feed! You do this by accessing your Control Panel, then settings. Look for where it says “Publish RSS feed” and click “yes.” This allows other people, like me, to subscribe to your blog. If you don’t, then I have to make an actual visit to your blog every day to see if you’ve updated it And while I love you all dearly, I just don’t have that kind of time.

So what does it mean, “subscribe to a blog.” Well, think of blogs like
magazines. You find one you like, you want to subscribe. No problem, but you need a place for your subscription to be sent to, sort of like your mailbox. That is called a “news aggregate”, but don’t worry about the term. There are many out there, I personally like Bloglines because it is free, easy and there is nothing to install on to your computer. Register with them and then you will have a “mailbox” for your blog subscriptions to be sent to.

There are many ways to subscribe to a blog. The best way is to add a “Sub with Bloglines” (if that’s who you’re using) button to your brower’s toolbar. Then when you’re reading a blog you want to subscribe to, you click the button on your browser and all the work is done for
you.

Another way is to look for a “subscribe to this blogs feed” graphic on the blog’s sidebar. Click that and again, all the work is done for you.

That’s it. It looks way more complicated than it is.

In a nutshell: you need a place to have your blog subscriptions sent to, think of it like a “blog mailbox.” Once you do this, the rest of the process makes sense and is as simple as clicking on links. Then, once your “blog mailbox” is set up and you’ve subscribed to any
number of blogs, you can check your mailbox as much as you want and read what your friends have been up to.

Give it a try. If you’re using HSB, it’s a lot easier to manage than the “friends” page on
your blog, . Plus, you can subscribe to anyone’s blog, even those not on hsblogger.

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