Oh, I'll give you a comment. I have no clue what the heck you're talking about! Just because I have a blog doen't mean I know anything. I will be visiting here again so that, perhaps, wisdom may imparted to me. I can't even get freakin' links on my own blog. Crap.

um... I'm aparently not one of the smart people, but through experience, don't expect much feedback (no offense TJ and Lisa)... you were smart in not promising a wonderful poem to the winner...

Ok, here's the tech low down... or down low... something like that.

Firefox is a must for everyone who uses the Internet. Why? First, Firefox is up to 5x faster than IE. Second, Firefox is about 1000x more secure which means significantly less (if any) spyware.

You don't have to use gmail to google reader, although you do have to have an account with google. If you're not using gmail already though, you should give it a shot. It is very much faster than other web based email, and they give you nearly 3 Gb in storage space! But, if you just want to use google reader, you can without google email. But, just in case you still want more choices, here is blog about different readers, comparing them etc.

Oh yeah, about the other blog rss feeds...

If it is on blogger, I think you can just add /atom.xml to the end of the url. For example, arwen's rss fee would be here

Just as I suspected. I still don't understand any of that...

Good question Ry. When you wrangle all of these rss feeds, your blog reading time will improve with the same leaps a bounds as adding a cell phone or a Tivo to your life. :P

I use Google Reader and I am very happy with it. You can try it out for yourself at reader.google.com. You need a Google account (which is free), but you do not need a gmail account.

My choice came down to the fact that I prefer a web based reader to the locally installed, client kind. With a web based reader I can use any computer to go to reader.google.com and read the blogs I'm subscribed to. With the other kind I'd have to install the reader app on every computer I want to use for reading blogs. (This may not be an issue for you, but it lets you know why I choose what I did.) The advantage to the locally installed ones like FeedDemon is that they have a few more features.

Once you decide on a reader, finding people's feeds is pretty easy. For most blogs, if you just tell your reader to see if there is an rss feed for the blog's address, it will find the rss thingy for you. For example, in Google Reader there is a search box where I can just put ilikecheeseandcrackers.blogspot.com and it will figure out that it should subscribe to ilikecheeseandcrackers.blogspot.com/atom.xml. My guess is most readers do the same. You can also look for the orange icon with the waves on it, (Ike has one on his site). Those icons will take you to the address for the site's rss feed.

As for as IE/Firefox, don't let the haters get you down. When people say that Firefox is faster than IE, without supporting tests, they are misinformed. Here is a test that shows that IE is faster than Firefox in 6 out of 7 tests. Also, it is widely reported, (here, for example), that Firefox has security holes, just like IE. IE has a larger market share, so they get targeted more and you hear about more attacks, but that does not warrant the claim that Firefox is 1000x more secure.

If you have questions about subscribing to feeds after you get a reader up and running, just let us know. I'm sure someone will give you a hand.

Hold on, hold on guys. Lets not bicker of whose browser is faster. If we're going to go that route then all the mac nerds would have to join in and then hell would freeze over or something.
Anyway, I think I've now got it all figured out. My hope in writing this blog was that Jonathan and Jason would respond. Seriously, my first thought was that you two are nerdy enough and are nice enough and probably already have my blog rss feed going to your respective readers. Perfect. Everything worked out perfectly. Thanks.

I kind of knew they'd respond too... and don't even know them!

i just use bloglines.com

i enter the sites that i read under "my feeds" and subscribe to them.

then i log on to bloglines and it tells me when someone has posted a new blog . . .

simple.

james told me about it.