I'm in love.

With Google Reader. How did I not find this sooner? It's fabulous. I am subscribed to around 200 different blogs, so it takes a while to look at all of them. Prior to my Google Reader discovery, I just used the blog roll on the side of my blog to look at all the blogs I was interested in. Now, I open up Google Reader and can scroll through them all at once. That eliminates excess clicking to open each blog. They're all rolled into one!

So, when I read all the blogs I follow now, I'm seeing something like this:


I've only come across two downsides to reading blogs this way:

1. I don't get to see the format of each blog. Google Reader is in a format that it just takes the text and image from each post and puts it on a plain white background. No big deal, just not as fun.

2. Some blogs (such as my own) don't show the images that are within the post. I'm not sure why this is and how to fix it. I just know that if there's not any images in the post and I think there probably are, click on the title and I'll be taken to the real website where I can see anything and everything it includes.

Some really awesome things about reading in Google Reader:

1. I can email an article to anybody I want by clicking the Email button at the bottom of any post. Bingo! That's about 400 emails to Jason last week. (Sorry honey... there was a lot of cool stuff to share with you!)

2. I can share things that I like with others. I can write what I liked about a certain post and share it and anybody can look at what I've shared and see what I've written. So cool!
3. I can star and smiley face things I like.

4. I can make my own tags for other people's articles. I've been using things like: Christmas Projects, Clothes, and Quilt to be able to create lists of things I'd like to be able to find again later. How cool is that?!

Google Reader is part of iGoogle which offers all sorts of other features I'm just discovering. I'm love, love, LOVING Google Reader. If you don't use it (or something similar) you should definitely check it out. It's wicked awesome. :D

Want to join? I think you can by going to google.com. Starting in the top left, there's a list of things like videos, images, etc. Click on the one that says more. On the bottom of the drop down menu, click on even more. Scroll down until you find the iGoogle. Click on that and it should get you started.

P.S. Happy 1/2 birthday to my sister, Katie.