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October 22, 2005

How to Subscribe to Our Blog

Please excuse my manners. We've been posting blog entries for almost a year and I realize that we never stopped to explain how you can subscribe to our blog. Shame on us! Seriously though, just a few months ago I had no clue how to subscribe to a blog. Once I figured it out it literally changed my web-surfing life. So I thought I would take a few minutes to share the basics with you. And of course if you're already subscribed or know how to subscribe to a blog then please kindly disregard this post.

Step #1 - First, it's important to understand what you are doing when you are subscribing to a blog. Essentially you are setting it up so that when a new post is made to the blog you'll be automatically updated. Why is this nice? Well, let's say that there are five blogs you really like. Instead of having to check five different websites separately for updates you can check one place and see updates to any of the blogs. Pretty cool huh?

Step #2 - The next step is figuring out what your options are for subscribing to blogs. There are literally dozens of blog readers (often called RSS readers, aggregators, etc.) out there. If you have a My Yahoo! page that can actually be your blog reader. Google now has a reader called the Google Reader. I am partial to Bloglines, an online service that is pretty easy to use. What you use is totally up to you. If you're looking for some more options try searching for rss reader or rss aggregator.

Step #3 - Cool, now you've got your blog reader in place. Now you need the details for subscribing to our blog. For most blog readers you'll need to plug a URL into your reader (this is called an RSS feed or an XML feed but that's not important). To subscribe to our blog you can use the following feed:

http://www.learnoutloud.com/content/blog/index.xml

You'll notice that if you click on that link you'll get a bunch of gobbledy-gook. Don't sweat that. Just cut and paste the link above into the place where your blog reader tells you to. And if you're My Yahoo! you'll see a link on our blog page that makes it pretty easy.

So that's pretty much all there is to it. If you aren't subscribing to blogs, give it a try. It's a great way to stay up to date with a lot of cool stuff. And definitely subscribe to BlogOutLoud. We've got lots more good stuff coming for you in the next few months!

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