As the title suggests, this entry is going to be highly technical.  I try to avoid technical topics because I don't think the people that are that interested in my life are across the board interested in technology, but I'm going to address a topic today that may change your life forever.  At least your online life.  I'm going to talk about Google Reader and how you can use it to keep up-to-date on your favorite web sites and blogs much more efficiently.  I know some of you are already big fans of Google Reader, and if that's you feel free to stop reading now.  You're not going to learn anything new here.

So how many internet news sites or blogs do you read on a regular basis?  I read 72.  If I had to go to 72 web sites every time I wanted to see if there was something new to read, I would never get anything else done.  Most likely, I would just stop reading about 90% of those sites.  And really, 72 is not at all a high number for some people.  January keeps up with more than 100 web sites and blogs, mostly related to photography and design.  How do we keep up with all this information?  Instead of actively going out to each site, we instead subscribe to them.

Google Reader, to use a technical term, is a news aggregator that keeps track of which sites you like to read and periodically checks them to see if anything new has been posted.  The end result here is that instead of going to all of your sites whenever you want to get caught up, you can go to a single place and see which sites have been updated since you last looked.  Then you can either read the updates directly on this single site, or follow links out to read them on the site themselves.  Here's an example of what this looks like: 

The Reader window is broken up into two main areas: A list of subscriptions on the left, and the items belonging to those subscriptions on the right.  This view, for example, shows that I have 3 unread articles from my "Butros' Tumblr" subscription, 2 from the "Jason's Tumblr" subscription, 6 from my subscription to the Whitehouse blog, and so on.  Because the Whitehouse Blog subscription is the currently selected subscription, the right-hand pane shows the articles assocaited with that subscription.  If I see a headline that interests me, I can click on it to see the details:

If I were to click the headline for that article again, I would be taken directly to the Whitehouse blog to read the full article on their site.

You can see how drastically this increases the productivity with which you can keep up with the news you care about.  But how does one go about subscribing with Google Reader? Well, if you're using Firefox like all good boys and girls do, it's a piece of cake.  When Firefox detects that a site can be subscribed to, it puts a small syndication link in the address bar that looks like this:    When you click that on a site that you want to subscribe to, Firefox will show you a preview of the articles included in the subscription and ask how you want to subscribe it:

To subscribe using Google Reader, make sure that "Google" is selected from the first drop menu and then check the box next to "Always use Google to subscribe to feeds." Finally, click on "Subscribe Now."  After this, Google will ask you whether you want to add the subscription to your Google homepage or subscribe using Google Reader.  Click the second button labeled "Add to Google Reader" to subscribe:

At this point, if you already have a Google account through Gmail or Picasa and you're already logged in, your new subscription will be added to your Google Reader account.  If you are presented with a Google login screen, you can use your already-existing Gmail account username and password.  Of course, if you don't have a Google account at all yet, you can sign up for a brand new account instead.

Thanks for bearing with me here, I know this is much more of a "how to" entry than people are used to, but it seemed like it was good information that needs to be shared; In the past month I've talked with a handful of people who have never heard of Google Reader and still go site-to-site keeping updated on all of their favorite web sites.  While there's nothing inherently wrong with doing it that way, using Google Reader is much more efficient and will allow you to keep up-to-date with many, many more sites you find interesting.

So give it a try and let me know how it went.  If you have any questions, or if you run into any roadblocks in the process, leave a comment below and we'll figure it out.