That orange RSS button on the left

So, as you may have noticed, the dates of the posts are back, but the timestamps seem to be permanently lost, for no apparent reason. But oh well, dates are good enough for me. It's Friday, so another webtool is being featured.

It recently came to my attention that there are a lot of people who read blogs, but do not know what an RSS is. So, since I have had one on my blog for a while now, I figured it would be appropriate for me to explain it.

Now, even I had ten blogs I was reading daily before I jumped on the RSS Bandwagon. I had them all bookmarked in a folder, and every morning I'd click on each one to see if there was a new post. I was skeptical of the "Google Reader" that my husband uses for no good reason. So, after many arguments, he finally convinced me to give it a try. Needless to say, it became another addiction, much like Twitter. Basically, you either go through and click on a "subscribe" button in each blog you read, or if you choose to use Google Reader (there are others out there), just put in the web addresses of the blog homepages and it'll figure it out. Then, you can put them in categories (I have one for Friends and Family blogs, another for Disney blogs, one for Board Game blogs, and a few others) if you want. But, it'll go through and update immediately when someone posts. That way, you can read blogs like you read email in Outlook... meaning you don't have to hunt for it, you just check and see if there's any there or not.

Using that little orange button to subscribe just makes it easier for you to stay updated with my (or other) posts. You don't have to be very tech-savvy to start it up, and after you input a few websites, it will even begin to start suggesting similar ones you might want to follow.

Only about 10% of internet users subscribe to RSS feeds, even though it is FREE. So, I encourage you to give it a shot and subscribe to my blog. It'll help me see if anyone still reads this, since comments have gone few and far between, and I don't have a "hit counter," although I should probably consider adding one. I also added a poll to the left to try and generate some readers through giving them the power to choose topics, so we'll see how many votes that gets in the next month as well. My other blog also has a RSS option, so if you read that one too, hit that up.