Do you have all of your favorite blogs bookmarked and check each one of them every day to see if something new has been posted? Get tired of all that clicking and waiting for the blog to load only to find it has the same post you read yesterday (or even longer ago than that)?
If you’re lazy like me, there is another way. There’s this thing called RSS or Really Simple Syndication (the really simple part is what made me want to try it). It’s been around, like, FOR EVER, as a standard to be used by web pages to publish a summary or full text content when a web page changes. A newer version of the same idea is called ATOM (I think it means All That Omlette's Mine or something) that has some added features and has been adopted as an IETF standard.
Guess what!?!
Surfwatch supports both!
There are several ways to subscribe to a feed like this so you can just check your “feed” page or mobile app. I really can’t write an exhaustive article on all of them and how to use them, but I can at least write an exhausting article on two that I use. If you don’t want or need any description of how I’m using RSS/ATOM, you can quit reading here. Thanks for stopping by. ;-)
Disclaimer: The following is based solely upon my personal experience. I am not an expert and there likely other ways that may work better for you.
Feedly
Feedly has one of the most widely used RSS/ATOM readers out there. They have free web-based and mobile versions with free and fee-based services. You’ll need to create a free account so they can maintain the feed sites you’ve selected for your self. To add a site, just click on the Add Content button (at the bottom left of the window in my case). I’ve used the option for Publications & Blogs. I typed in surfwatch.blogspot.com into the Search field, and it found “Surfwatch… Who’s watching the waves”, and at least one other site. Pick the one for us wave watchers. It’ll show you matching sources and will show a little bit of text from the most recent post. Click the Follow button for us. That’s it. From this point on, whenever there’s a new post to the Surfwatch blog, Feedly will show a little number by your feeds to let you know how many unread posts are at the site. Clicking on a feed pops up a window of a post. You can read it there, or choose to go to the blog’s website.
Opera Web Browser
I doubt many of you use the Opera web browser. I started using it because it has a built-in VPN client with free VPN services (not the fastest in the world, but it works easily) and because I use it’s “speed dial” to switch around to web sites I use all the time. It turns out it has a built-in news reader that it calls Personal News. When I open a new browser tab, I have mine set to show me my Opera “speed dial” page, which is a collection of the sites I visit daily. For me, it’s a faster way than using bookmarks. The speed dial page has a small panel on the left which also shows a small icon for Personal News (RRS feeds in my case). It shows a little green badge of any of blogs I’m following has anything new. I can choose to bring up a page with all the feeds I follow, or I can bring up specific ones. They’re then presented in order of the most recent posts first, with summary information about each post. If the summary looks of interest, you can click to go to the blog’s site.
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