Blogging about blogging

Found a cool new (to me) program that is changing the way I surf the web - a little bit, anyway. Let me explain.

For years now I've used Firefox as my web browser of choice. On my bookmarks toolbar folder at the top of the page I have embedded another folder that I titled "AM". It's simply all of the pages I visit in the morning to catch up on news and other things I'm interested in. Firefox has a cool feature that lets me 'open all in tabs' so I click on that in the morning and open a dozen sites at once. I click through them as I am drinking my morning coffee and get all caught up on my favorite sites for the day. Many are only updated once a day, so that has worked well.

I also have several blogs that have been included on that list - my favorite of which has been Josh Griffin's Don't Believe Everything You Read on the Internet - he's a youth pastor and Star Wars fan so you can see the draw for me! Plus he's a great blogger - interesting, brief (unlike mine!), and very frequent updates! But I digress...

I have also been adding some additional bloggers to my frequently read list (see my Blog Friends for some examples) including my sister, brother-in-law, and now our senior pastor. I discovered that checking once a day is really not enough to stay current.

That's when I began searching for tools that would help me with that. I know there's others out there, but the one I stumbled across that seems very helpful for me is the free Google Reader. It collects RSS feeds from the blogs I read and puts them all together on one page. Plus it has a cool tool for the link bar labeled "next >" that takes me to the next unread blog entry! It's awesome. I am somewhat chagrined that I didn't discover this before! And here I consider myself a techie geek.

Nevertheless, I'd recommend this tool to you if you aren't using a newsreader or aggregator (is that a word?) Check it out! If you know of some that work better, let me know.