JoelNothman.com

People tell me they’re not into the blog thing. But they’re well into the email thing—after all, it pretty much comes direct to you and so is much easier to access.

So at my guess people just aren’t using blogs properly. The key to the modern blog is that they can be read as a web page, as an email, or in just about any other collected format. This is due to something called RSS feeds. An RSS feed collects together a summary of a site, such as news from the Jerusalem Post, or posts from my blog, or comments on my blog.

So instead of me having to send out annoying mass emails along my travels, what you need is an RSS reader or aggregator. There are literally hundreds of these around.

Browser or software-based

I personally use Opera which is also my web browser, email client, etc (and I’ll probably talk about it more later). Firefox allows you to add feeds to your bookmarks, but the Sage extension is more powerful. For IE, try Pluck. Popular IE wrappers like Maxthon and Avant also provide this. In the web browsers (at least Opera, FF and IE7) you’ll find that the icon in the address bar will be a handy indication of a feed being available.

You could get an RSS reader for an email program like Outlook or Outlook Express. Eg RSS Popper. MSN messenger can tell you about new posts with the very confusing MSN Alerts, while other IM clients have easy RSS plugins that show either pop-up alerts or messages in your contact list.

Another way to get your feeds is in a program made especially for that. About.com has their top ten for Windows.

The big problem with all of these options is that you only have access to your favourite feeds when you have the computer with the software set up.

In your email

There are lots of options available that will send blog updates to your email. Enter your email in the “subscribe” box on the right if you want to receive mine. If you want to get others through this service, see here.

Web-based aggregators

Gmail and Yahoo Mail Beta both allow you to show feeds. Gmail calls them Web clips. Numerous other aggregators are available online, such as bloglines.com Google Reader.

Now I hope you can enjoy your favoufrite blogs more!