The other day, I used Gears, Google’s offline data synchronization tool, for the first time… and it was really handy!

Being in Sydney for the Web Directions conference for the whole week, I had got somewhat behind in my RSS feeds in Google Reader (we’re talking 1200 unread items – and that was after I had gone through a few hundred already).

At the airport waiting for the flight home to board, browsing the internet, an epiphany struck – Chrome, the new browser from Google, has Google Gears built in and I had it on my laptop. I remembered seeing a little “online – click to go offline” icon at the top of the Google Reader screen… so I loaded up Chrome, went to Google Reader, found the icon and clicked it. Reader then proceeded to download 1200 items (which took around 3 minutes) and go into “offline” mode.

I disconnected from wireless – and it didn’t work: click on a category, page cannot be opened. Damn.

I reconnected the juice, clicked a few different categories, then disconnected again – and this time it was all sweet.

The plane trip took an extra hour due to strong headwinds (well over 5 hours to Perth!), but I used that time to read the 1200 items and flag some for checking out later. Back in Perth, I clicked on reconnect and “whump” – off it went, synching post status. That was a tense minute or so – I would never have found those 100-odd posts I had flagged for followup again, had it not worked – but it did work.

Many people get nervous about the amount of influence that Google has, myself included – but when their software works together so well it’s hard to justify using other systems! Google Gears is actually available as an extension for Firefox and a few other browsers too, so you could theoretically eliminate Chrome from the equation – but had I not been trying out Chrome, I would not have tried out Gears. If you’re a travelling blog addict, it might be just what you need.

a

I started my blog in January this year and only really started reading other blogs a month or so before that. To keep up to date with what was happening on my favourite blogs, at first I just saved the blogs to my online favourites and would check them when I went on line.

Then I found the wonders of RSS (Really Simple Syndication). RSS is a format which is used to publish frequently updated content such as blogs, news, Twitter and podcasts. A feed (RSS document) contains either the full text of the content or a summary of the content.

The RSS Icon as shown above, is found all over the internet and tells you that this site has a feed to which you can subscribe to. The benefit of RSS is that you collate the content from multiple sources into one place.

You read the RSS content using software called an RSS reader or a feed reader. These can be web-based like Bloglines or Google Reader or desktop-based like in Outlook 2007.

When I first set up a reader I was using the one provided in Outlook 2007. Two major laptop crashes and wiped hard drives which saw me lose my subscriptions to blogs twice, made me look for an online alternative.

I chose to set up an online reader with Google. Since establishing it back in July, I now have over 130 different subscriptions from blogs, news alerts and Twitter. With so many subscriptions if I don’t check my reader for a couple of days, it can easily be then exceeding 1000 items.

Naturally this is a little overwhelming and it wasn’t until I learnt a trick from Ed Dale on the 30 Day Challenge that I found a way to easily manage this volume of items in my reader.

The image below is a screen shot from my Google Reader. Note where the red arrow is pointing. It is set on the default Google Reader setting of Expanded view. While this view is great as you get to see the post without clicking on it to open it, it doesn’t allow for quick scanning.

In this next image below, I have returned my Google Reader to List View which is how I now use this service. With all my subscriptions listed, I can skim through them quickly, stopping to read those that I want to. Once I have made my way through the list, I click on “Mark All as Read” and I have emptied my reader.

Since making this very simple change to my reader, I have now been able to keep the number of items in my reader under control and best of all, keep up to date with my favourite blogs in a time efficient manner.

Another feature of Google Reader which I love, is that even if I have, as noted above, marked all as read, but realise that I actually wanted to refer back to one of those posts, I can still retrieve the post.

The above image shows a folder that has all posts read. If I want to go back and see a previously read post, I simply click on “View all items” and all previous posts will be retrieved. Effectively they are never really deleted and can be recalled at any time while you are subscribed to that blog.

This is one way to manage your blog subscriptions. How do you manage yours?

a

I have created a blogroll from some of my RSS feeds in Google Reader. I believe there are similar methods available for other RSS feed readers too.

In Google Reader, click on the Settings link at the top of the page. I’ve included a screengrab because it took me ages to find the Settings link.

You’ll see a page similar to the one below. I’ve setup my blogroll so that it’s categorised into folders and I want to blogroll the Dailies folder’s feeds so to start the process I need to Share this folder.

Tick the folder that you want to blogroll, in my case ‘Dailies’. You’ll then need to Change Sharing so that it’s public, which is located on the dropdown menu at the top.

Once you’ve done this you’ll have a ‘Add blogroll to your site’ link next to the folder you want to blogroll. Click on this Add blogroll link.

The resulting window will allow you to style your blogroll links and to copy the code to copy to your website.

In my case, because I’ve added the title and the look and feel within my blog, I deleted the title and I chose None for the colour scheme but do what you like in this section to get the look and feel you want.

If you’re with Blogger you can add the code automatically to your blog, but if you have a different system for your blog then you’ll need to copy the Javascript code. This is what I did because I use WordPress.

In my WordPress blog I created a new page just called Blogroll, and added the code underneath my heading and small introduction. The final result can be seen here.

a