Now I realize that some of my readers are more tech savvy than others. You probably aren’t here to learn about how to set up a Google Reader account. You’re here to read about soap! But let’s say you are a soapmaker and you want to keep up with some soap blogs. Several of my soapmaking friends have expressed that they know how to follow blogs in blogger, but get confused when it comes to following any of the others. Well, Google Reader is the answer! You can subscribe to all of the blogs you wish to follow in one place.

Let’s start with setting up a Google Reader account, for those who don’t already have one. I’m going to utilize some resources that are already available (with screenshots!) to explain how to do this. Start with this post. Then continue to the second post. In the second post, the author describes several ways to subscribe to a feed. I use the first one. When I find a blog that I want to follow, I go to the home page, then copy and paste the URL into the “Add a Subscription” box.

Almost as important as subscribing to the feeds is how to organize them! You will want to get familiar with the “feed settings” at the top of the window where the blog posts are displayed. There are several important things you can do with the feeds once they are in your reader. The first is to organize them into folders. Once a feed is in your reader, you’ll want to click on it, then go to “feed settings” and select “new folder”. Once you create a folder, it will show up in the “feed settings” drop-down menu and you can click on it to put the feed inside the folder. You can create as many folders as you like, and move your feeds to the appropriate folders. You can also re-name a subscription, or unsubscribe from the feed using the “feed settings”. Don’t forget to subscribe to your own blog to see how it looks in a reader!

You’ll notice that beside each feed is a number in parentheses. That’s the number of unread posts in that feed. As you scroll down to read each post, those numbers will decrease. If you don’t want to read every post, simply click “mark as read”. You’ll notice that some feeds will give you all of the post to read inside the reader and others might make you click over to the blog itself to finish reading the post.

Once your Google Reader is set up, you just have to remember to visit it. I keep a tab open in my Firefox browser so I don’t forget!

Please let me know if this information was helpful – or if you are already a Google Reader user. I realize there are other platforms out there to subscribe to feeds, so if you have another preference, let me know that too!