How to sign up for and use Google Reader

I was thinking about how my mom was saying that she wasn’t sure how often to visit my site anymore because I’ve gotten out of the habit of blogging every day (note strictly true - I just don’t blog here every day). Blogging every day is a habit I’d like to get into again. I feel better when I’ve written something.

[Image: sign in]But the reality is I have no idea when I’m going to be posting. So I was going to walk my mom through the sign up process for Google reader. That way she can start accumulating the blogs she reads into one place, and she won’t need to worry about checking my site for new posts since the RSS reader will tell her when I’ve written something new.

But then I realized that my mom is probably not the only person who might have heard of “RSS Readers” and “feeds,” but need a little bit more than “just go use bloglines” to get them started. So here’s the pictures-included guide to signing up for google reader, my RSS reader of choice.

First, you need to go to http://reader.google.com.

This will take you to the welcome screen for Google Reader. If you already have a Google Account (this means, for example, a gmail address) you’re now 70% done with this process. Congratulations.

For those of you who don’t have a Google Account, the process of creating one is simple, and you can use your existing e-mail address. Just click the big blue “Create an account” button, which will take you to the next screen, where you fill in your information:

[Image: info]

After you’ve done that, agreed to the terms of service, and created your account, you will be taking to your Google Reader home screen.

Google Reader is simultaneously one of the most powerful and simplest to use readers I’ve seen. This is why I like it so much. You have the ability to share posts that you want other people to see, star posts you want to find later, re-arrange your feeds by tags (categories), and view posts in digest form or separated by individual blog.

But you don’t need to do any of those things. If you want to learn about the advanced features of Google Reader, I’d suggest going through their help section.

Here, I am just going to show you how to add blogs. On the left hand side of the reader screen, there is a box that says “Add subscription.” If you click ion the little blue plus sign, it will expand so that you can type in what you’re looking for.

[Image: add sub]

There are a number of different ways you can enter the blog you are looking for. You can enter a Google search term, and it will show a page of results from which you can choose the blog you were looking for. You can also enter the address of an RSS feed (this can usually be found on blogs by finding the orange broadcast icon. It points to this link).

You can also, usually, just type in the web address of the blog, and google will do the rest of the work for you.

Try typing in “http://www.jason-preston.com”

You should now see my latest posts in the right hand column, and in the left hand column you should see [Jason Preston] listed, with a number after it. This number indicates the number of unread items in this feed. There should be several of them, because at this point Google Reader does not know if you have read the posts it just sucked in.

They will become “read” simply by selecting them in the right hand column. You can navigate by using the scroll bar, or the mouse wheel, or entirely by keyboard. For example, if you click in the right hand column on the top post, it becomes selected and lines up at the top of the window.

If you then hit “J” on the keyboard, the next post will take its place.

You can now experiment by adding more of your favorite blogs. Not sure if it’s a blog? Type the address in to the add subscription box anyway. If they have an RSS feed, Google will find it.

This way, the next time you want to catch up on your online reading, you can just go to Google Reader instead of visiting seven or eight sites. And without visiting the sites, you can tell if there is anything new to read or not by which sites are bolded, and you can tell how much you have to read from the number to the right of the name.

Questions to the comments, please. Now go forth and (feed)read.