So something occurred to me after my blog turned into a family reunion of sorts when my mom, my dad, my brother, and my sister all left comments on it. I then found out that my grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles were also reading our blog on a daily basis. Some of them couldn’t figure out how to leave comments, others asked me to let them know whenever a new blog was written. As I head home to Massachusetts for Thanksgiving, I decided I’m going to write a blog that answers most of their questions before they get to ask me in person! Even if you’re a commenting and blogging pro, keep reading…you might learn a thing or two!
RSS Feeds – A few months back, I had no idea what the heck an RSS Feed was, or why I needed it. I figured, “Why not just hit up the sites I like, and read them when I can?” Well, as the blogging world slowly became a bigger part of my day, and the number of blogs that I read daily moved from just a few to a few dozen, it got quite complicated. Luckily, I stumbled across another blog by Tim Ferris (a guy that I can’t seem to talk enough about)who explained why RSS feeds are so great.
RSS Feed stands for Really Simple Syndication. Sounds like something easy to handle, right? Think of an RSS feed reader (Google Reader is my favorite) as your own personalized online newspaper. Anytime you go to a new site, keep an eye out for an RSS feed link. When you click on this link, and add it to your reader. Now, every time any of your blogs are updated with new content, they are added to your Feed Reader! From this reader, you can keep track of dozens and dozens of blogs, instead of visiting dozens and dozens of websites. This has allowed me to scan the headlines of over one hundred blogs a day in probably fifteen minutes. Click here to try it with our RSS Feed. There are many options to choose, depending on which reader you want. I suggest the Google Reader.
Email Subscriptions – For those of you who don’t want to jump into the RSS world, and don’t mind one extra email a day, you can sign up for our Sixthman Email subscription. If there is a new blog posted, our Email system will shoot out an email blast to anybody that has signed up! You won’t even have to visit the site (unless you want to leave a comment), you can read the whole blog in your email.
Leaving Comments – This is an easy one, but often overlooked by people! On each of our blogs, you’ll see by the title, and then again at the end of the blog, the link to post a comment on that blog. It will either say “No Comments” or “X Comments” depending on how many people have commented. Simply click on that link, type in your comment, and there you go! We spend a lot of time writing these blogs, and love to know that you guys are reading them. We try to go out of our way to respond to all comments, so we really appreciate those of you who write back to us!
What do I subscribe to? – Here’s a list of some of the blogs that I subscribe to:
Tim Ferris’s Four Hour Work Week Blog – The lifestyle design blog of the author of the Four Hour Work Week, the book that changed my life and ultimately change my life path towards a career at Sixthman.
Seth Godin’s Blog – The number one business blogger in the world. Every day, Seth posts a blog that will completely change how you think about business and marketing today.
Cali and Jody - A blog written by the author’s of Andy’s favorite book, “Why Work Sucks.”
Crave - My favorite nerd blog! Keeps me up to date on all things in the technology world: videogames, computers, apple, etc.
What blogs do you guys like reading? Any suggestions for me?
-Steve