Thursday, November 6, 2008

Feed Me!

One of the nice things about horses is that you don't have to be technology savvy to enjoy them.

If you want to enjoy horse blogs, however, you have to crank your knowledge up a bit. You've obviously gotten that far.

If you want to make blog reading really easy, though, you have to learn to subscribe.

Okay, okay. A lot of you already know this. But since I learned about blog subscriptions just a few months ago (and I shall be eternally grateful to the friend who taught me), I'm going to assume some others out there could use an explanation about feeds.

"Feeds?" you say, "As in beet pulp and Equine Senior?" Not exactly. I'm talking about RSS feeds. It stands for Really Simple Syndication Feeds. I haven't figured out yet what that means. Fortunately, those of us who still think "booting up" means lacing our Ariats can take advantage of RSS feeds without understanding them.

Basically, an RSS feed transfers content from its website of origin to a central location of your choosing. There, you can peruse it at your leisure. You never have to worry about forgetting to visit your favorite blogs, and you never have to type in web addresses or scan your "bookmarks" list. It's rather like having a magazine made to order and updated automatically.

For example, I use Google Reader to follow about 30 blogs. As each blogger updates his or her site, my password-access Google Reader page alerts me to the new post. I can either read the post right there in Google Reader, or else click on a link to view the post in its original context.

Those who don't read scads of blogs may find it more practical to have a few favorites delivered straight to an email inbox. This method is highly convenient but may result in occasional formatting blips. In the event of a formatting problem, just follow the link in your email message straight to the originating blog, where you can see the post as it was intended to appear.

Both options -- RSS Subscriptions and Email Subscriptions -- are available from The Barb Wire. Subscribe now by clicking on the links in below, or take advantage of the links in the sidebar anytime.

Subscribe in a reader

or

Subscribe to The Barb Wire by Email

Either option will walk you through a quick, easy set-up, and you'll never miss another post. Happy reading!

P.S. Don't forget to get yourself entered in the drawing for that Indian bosal from Crazy Ropes! See The Best of the Barb Wire Contest for details.

P.P.S. No, I haven't been holding out on you -- that photo was taken on July 1, 2006, when Ripple Effect was two hours old.

2 comments:

Jonna said...

Informative.. thanks... I have to sheepishly admit, while I work in an IT department and technology is part of my everyday world, this blog craze is fairly new to me so I appreciate the info. BTW, you honestly follow 30 blogs?? Wow, you must never sleep girl!

Tamara Baysinger said...

Yes, I really do follow about 30 blogs...most are equestrian blogs, some are vegan cooking blogs, and a few are organic farm/garden blogs. But I do sleep! Most blogs aren't updated daily, for one thing. And, nobody says I have to read daily the ones that are.

The beauty of Google Reader is that it keeps track for me of which blogs have posts I've not yet read, so I don't waste time buzzing around the web to check. Also, the posts remain "unread" until I mark them otherwise -- so if I'm not in the mood to read a particular topic, but I know I'll want to later, I just leave that post unread for the time being. Works great. :-)