How To Keep Up With This Blog

by Leanne Shawler


Since blogging is new to a number of Good Sammers, I thought I’d write this little “cheat sheet” on keeping up with the blog.

1. If you are on Facebook, be sure to “Like” the Good Samaritan Episcopal Church page. When a new blog entry is posted, we automatically send out a notice on Facebook.
2. If you are on Twitter, follow us at @GoodSamSanDiego and ditto, ditto.
3. If you are on our email list, every week you’ll get a summary of the week’s posts and links to read the blog entries.
4. You can follow us by email. In the right hand column at the top there is a “Subscribe” heading. More on that below. Beneath that is “Follow By Email”. When you enter your email address here, each time a blog is posted, it will be emailed to you.
5. Enter your information in the “Subscribe” section. This last is best when you find you’re following more than one blog!

There are two options to subscribe to the Posts RSS feed or to subscribe to the All Comments RSS feed.

What’s an RSS feed? RSS is geek-speak for Real Simple Syndication. You’ve heard of TV shows or newspaper columns getting syndicated: that is shared across various cable channels or newspapers. This is the electronic version thereof.

So you can have something called a RSS Reader that will collate all the blogs you like to read in one place, which you check, like your email to see what’s new.

I use Google Reader which presents the text and pictures without any of the pretty blog formatting. I’m not familiar with the other readers, so if anybody else is please write a blog post about it! We’ll collect them together.

If you’ve used Google Groups, Calendar, email or some of the other features they have (not including their search engine), you probably already have a Google account. Go to http://reader.google.com/ and it will bring you to the login page. There’s also a blue button to create an account. When you’re done creating the account -- make sure to check your privacy settings, by going to the black bar at the top and clicking on the down arrow next to your email address. Remember you probably don’t want people to know your birthday and stuff like that. (See security in the sidebar)

Now you’re ready to subscribe to your first blog. Head back here and click on Posts and choose “Add to Google”. When you go back to Google Reader, you’ll see posts from this blog. You read them just like email: if they are bold they are unread. They get grayed out as you read them. When you refresh, read blog posts disappear, so if you want to read them again make sure to either “star” them or “Mark as unread”. These options and others are at the bottom of each post in Google Reade

To comment on a post when you use Google Reader, you need to click on the title of the post which takes you to the blog. (If you’re stuck on how to comment, read the guide from All Our Voices in the right hand column.) 

That’s probably more than you wanted to know. Any questions?