Subscription Links

Everyone, I found out how to easily keep track of changes to blogs and comments. It is a gadget called Subscription links. Once you add it, other users who view your page will see new links on the blog that allow you to Subscribe to Posts and/or All Comments. Once you have set this up, I can add your subscription links to my Google Reader by clicking on the two links. What happens is when you click those links, you are prompted to login with your Google Mail user name and password that you already setup. So, there is no software to install, no new account to setup. All you need to do is setup this new gadget, and I can subscribe to your pages (and you mine).

You can see the Subscription Links in the upper left corner of my blog, so you can already subscribe to mine. But, I can't subscribe to yours unless you add these two links. Let me know in my comments when you have added it, and then I will visit your page and subscribe to the links.

Let me know if you have any questions.

*** UPDATE ***

Actually, you can add blogs to the Google reader without having the subscription links. You just need the URL. However, doing this exercise wasn't completely unfruitful, because I found out by doing this that your comments and posts and actually in a directory that you Blog pulls from. So, if you decide not to add the gadget, or other people you know haven't setup the gadget, you can still add them to your blog reader. A few things to note about using the Google Reader. One, there is no sound (that might be a good thing if you are tired of turning the music down or off). Two, you still have to click on the blog link to make any comments (at least, I haven't found a way to do it in the Google Reader yet). Three, if you do do it by subscribing links, you will have two links with seemingly the same name. All you have to do is edit them and rename them. The way I did it in mine was like this:

Got Blog? http://slimebros.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Got Blog? - Comments http://slimebros.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

Or, you can continue doing it the way you always have. But the cool thing is is once you have read all the ones in the Reader, the next time you login or refresh the screen, it will show you if there is anything new. The cool thing is you don't have to really re-read everything. All you have to do is scroll down real fast (all the posts for a blog are on one page) and it will automatically show them as read. And, all the newest ones are at the top of the list, just like the regular blog. The reason why it shows them as unread once you subscribe is because it is new to the Google Reader and doesn't know you have read them (duh duh de duh). But, once you scroll down with your mouse, each post in the blog becomes "active" and is therefore read, even if you didn't really read it.

I found out that I actually had set this up a few years ago, because I had a couple of blogs that I setup a subscription to, and there were a bunch that showed as unread. Pretty nifty.