At first, Google Reader was an alien beast to me. I had a multitude of opposition. What do I want a collection of feeds for? Don’t my bookmarks do the same thing? That would take me forever to move them over to a new system!

And it did take forever. I didn’t start using it for everything at first. Just the websites I liked to check every once in awhile but was not personally invested in. You know — the silly sites and guilty pleasures like Cake Wrecks, Lolcats and Post Secret. But then my circle of blog friends began to grow and one by one I added them too.

Now my dear precious Google Reader brings in everything from my favorite Kijiji feeds informing me of local garage sales –> all of the Chick blogs at my fingertips –> an identical listing of podcasts as what’s on the iPod so I can listen while doing boring stuff around the house.

Literally anything with an RSS can be put in there. And you’d be surprised – these days everything is RSS. It really is an amazing tool and I am so glad that I was introduced to it. With all things technology, it hasn’t intruded on my life but enhanced it — with whipped cream and a cherry!

This morning I discovered that the Reader team had sprinkles waiting for me too.

Sprinkled!

These new tools promise to make my experience even better and I wanted to share the love.

1. Subscribe as you surf – go to your Settings, then look for the Goodies tab. Scroll down a bit as its second from the bottom. It gives you a link that you can drag and drop onto your browser’s toolbar. Clicking that link when you are on a webpage instantly takes you to Reader where you can hit subscribe. Without having to find the RSS, then copy and paste it over and then hit subscribe. WAY faster!!
2. Send to — this feature is newer and allows you to turn on the option to easily share posts to other social sites like facebook, twitter, tumblr, digg, reddit, the list goes on. Again go to your Settings page but look for the Send to tab and customize to your hearts content.
3. Submit your own ideas and vote on other’s ideas to improve your reading experience! Yes, this is basically the Reader team wanting you to do their marketing research for them, but it is so remarkably satisfying to see them working to do things better and wanting my puny insect of an opinion that it really is irresistible. Why do I feel like a… oh what the hell… Vive la Revolution! Click here to give your humble contribution.
   

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