Taking Place In The Trees

The other day an arborist friend and I were talking about all the air tool posts on Taking Place and Taking Place In The Trees.  He has been a great promoter of these blogs in the arboricultural world, and has kept me informed about all the people to whom he’s very kindly been sending the links.  I told him that I’d noticed spikes in readership whenever he sent out a mailing, and that I appreciated his efforts.  In reply, he said, “Well, I just wish there was some way the computer could tell me when you’ve put up a new post, so I could just look at it when it went up, rather than having to check the blog each day.”

Well!!

There are in fact a few ways to do this, and to help make checking this blog and others much, much easier, here’s a little tutorial on how to use Google Reader.  Google Reader is a free site that lets you list the blogs you want to keep up with; when a new post appears on any of those blogs, your blog list on Google Reader shows it to you.First, you need an account with Google. You might already have one if you use gMail, or if you’ve ever signed up with Blogger. If you don’t have one, go to the Google sign-in pageand click “Create an account now”.  All you have to give them is your email address and a password. If you already have an account, sign in.My sister — who develops software and who writes a couple of blogs herself – wrote these instructions on how to sign up for and use Google Reader, which she says is “like an enhanced list of bookmarks.”  She says:

This takes just moments to set up.

First, you need an account with Google. You might already have one if you use gMail, or if you’ve ever signed up with Blogger.  If you don’t have one, go to the Google sign-in pageand click “Create an account now”.  All you have to give them is your email address and a password. If you already have an account, sign in.

Now you can set up your reader. The Google Reader Help section has a more comprehensive description of the ways this can be done. The following is just one method.

First go to a blog you normally read so that we have something to put in the reader. This blog will do (hehehe). Put the cursor in the address bar and highlight the whole address.

Hit the ‘Copy’ command (either right-click on the mouse and use the popup menu or go to the ‘Edit’ command on the Toolbar and press ‘Copy’ in the dropdown menu) to copy the address.

Now go to the Google reader page. Take a look around at it. You’ll probably use several of its features once it’s set up. Don’t read the whole thing right now, because you’ll be overwhelmed, but be aware that it has lots of useful information on it.

On the left-hand side, you’ll see a green bar with a link that says “Add subscription.” Click it.

Aha! A little box pops up. Put the cursor in the box. This is where the new blog address goes. Hit “Paste” (again, either right-click on the mouse and use the popup menu or go to the ‘Edit’ command on the Toolbar and press ‘Copy’ in the dropdown menu) to paste the address, and then click “Add.” You don’t always have to put the exact address, because if you’re close, or just put a word, Google Reader will give you some possibilities to choose from.

Now you have a blog in your reader. In the left panel you can see its title. If it’s in bold, with a number in parentheses, that means it has new items to read. In the right panel you see a listing of the entries. You can read the blog entries in the reader, or if you click the name of the blog above the entries it will open in a new window.

I recommend that you add another blog right now to cement the steps in your memory.