First time setting up google reader

I know some of you are here from Porter County Politics, where I left a link to this site.

If you aren't using a feed reader of any kind, you're missing a chance to save tons of time and widen your funnel for watching who's saying what. I had a conversation with a professional a couple days ago who related "I don't have time to write blogs and such" Well that may or may not be the case, but everyone has time to check their inbox on email right? If you can check an email inbox even once a day, then you can check your RSS Feed inbox too.

I use Google Reader, there are other RSS readers and organizers, but for this purposes of this post I'll do a walk-thru on Google Reader setup.

1. Go to Google Homepage
2. Choose 'more' just above google logo
3. Choose reader from popup list
4. If you have a gmail account or google account, then enter that email address and password in and skip to #6
5. If you need a gmail-google account choose "create an account" - this will require entering your current email address, a password of your choice (8 characters) entering the squiggly word that you can see but a spam computer can't ... and then "I accept, create my account" ... google will send you an email at your normal email account that you entered. They do this to be sure again that you're not a spammer. Check your email and click that "validation link" then "click here to continue" from account set up
6. There's a video that explains google reader as you enter the site, you may well want to watch that video.
   
7. Let's enter our first subscription. If you open another tab in your browser and go to Porter County Politics.
8. On the immediate right is an orange button, the universal logo for RSS feeds, whenever you see that button you will find the RSS code for the site you're on. Right click on that orange button, and choose "copy link location" or "copy shortcut" so you can grab the web address associated with that link button.
   
9. Go back to your reader tab ... choose "add subscription" and an empty box will pop up, right click that empty box and choose paste to put that code from the Politics site into the box. Then "add"
10. It's that easy, you just chose your first subscription, I would guess 10 posts will load into your reader, and you'll find lots of ways to organize these posts by topic or tag. You can read the entire post as you skim, or just the headlines. I feed just under 1,000 sites to my reader, so I just skim the headlines and then click the posts that I find interesting.
    
11. In a future post here we'll talk about sharing on google reader. But for now go grab your favorite site's RSS feed and start building your subscriptions. Remember that the RSS feed is the orange logo box, which almost every site has, hint look at toolbar in Internet Explorer if you can't find RSS, sometimes it won't be on the actual site, but will be available in the toolbar and the logo will be bright orange there. In Firefox the logo is in the address pane.
    

More later. Let me know if it works for you.

1.