If You Like It Then You Better Put a Ring On It

Okay, I'm no Beyonce, but while the Desperate Pastor's readers are growing nicely month by month, and the stats show that many of you visit here regularly, only a handful are subscribers. Did you know you can subscribe to the blogs you read regularly?

I read dozens of blogs daily, using Google Reader. All I do is open my Google Reader account on my web browser, and it automatically tells me how many (and which) blogs have new posts to read. It's easy.

The easiest way to subscribe to a blog is to set up a Google Reader account and "add subscriptions" to RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary (of course, the acronym can be explained in many other creative ways), and it allows you to automatically receive updates from web sites. If you subscribe to an RSS feed, you get only what you want. If you tell the feed reader to stop collecting a site's feed, it will stop. And there's no spam. No spam!

To subscribe to Desperate Pastor, just click on the second item in the column at right, where it says, "Subscribe to Desperate Pastor," and choose the "news aggregator" you want to use (I recommend Google), and it will take you to the appropriate site. Then just set up your login and password, and you're good to go!

Oh, and should you ever encounter "Atom" or "web" feeds instead of "RSS" feeds, let not your heart be troubled...or your mind confused. Essentially, they are all the same, just different names and slightly different protocols for the same functionality. Your RSS feed reader should be able to use either version just fine.