Embracing technology as the pastor: Google Reader

Most people know how to use a computer to create documents, maintain a calendar, check email and surf the web. 

But to do such things can be laborious.  So today I'm starting a series of posts about some lesser known ways that I use my computer to speed up my ministerial labours.

I want to start by recommending Google Reader.

If you want to keep up on what's happening in the world, blogs have become necessary reading. 

But blogs can be a pain to check.  In my initial experience with a blog, I regularly checked it with my browser to see if anything new had been written.  This was a complete waste of time if there were no new posts.

So to avoid having to visit a blog to check for new posts, some people subscribe to blog posts via email.  Every time a new post is published they are sent an email.  But this means blog posts arrive in your inbox when you may not be in a position to read them.  So you end up leaving the blog posts in your inbox until you have time to read them.  But this means blog posts clog up your email inbox making it difficult to get your inbox to zero as I've recommended.

This is where Google Reader comes in handy.  Google Reader allows you to add blog feeds to it and then keeps a record of which posts you've read and which you haven't.  This means that you can check all your blogs quickly when you have time designated to do so.

You can also group your feeds together for different reading speeds.  For example, I have blogs that I want to quickly skim but would rarely read in depth - so I group these together and zip through them quickly in one hit.  Then there are other blogs that I will usually read in depth and so I group these together too and read them more slowly.

Another advantage of Google Reader is that it doesn't just keep up with blogs, it will subscribe you to any site that has an RSS feed.  Thus I keep saved ebay searches in my Google Reader so that I'm alerted whenever a particular product I'm after comes up on ebay.  I also subscribe to things like my local member of parliament's speech feed so I can quickly read a full transcript of every speech he gives in parliament.

If you want to quickly keep up with the latest information, Google Reader is a must.