Helpful Stuff

So this post just has some little tips of things that you can do to make your blogging life a little easier.

Profile Picture
Here's the "official" instructions of how to add a profile picture:
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42093
Basically, you just post a picture of yourself, then you get the link, and add it to your profile. You can then delete the post (but not the picture), if you don't want it to show up on your blog.

RSS Reader
RSS feeds are awesome. They're basically ways for you to get updates from sites automatically, so then you don't have to keep checking them to see what's new. I use it to get my daily fix of information/news, but it also works great for bloggers. Then you can just go to a single place and see a list of all of the new posts and comments on all of the blogs that you're interested in. It really is a HUGE time saver and makes you a much more efficient blogger/surfer.

So how does this all work?
First you need to choose an RSS Reader. I recommend using Google Reader (the one that I use), but you're free to use the one built into your browser or any of the MANY available RSS readers.
Once you have a reader chosen, then you need to import all of the feeds. I'm actually working on creating a little webpage that will create a file that you can import that will have all of the feeds for the blogs that you link to on your blog, so you can wait until I get that finished, or if you're really anxious to get started and want to set it up by hand, then here's the steps for Firefox (on a side note, if you don't use Firefox, then I suggest that you do):

Firefox 2.0 (If you have Firefox 1.5 or older, then I suggest that you upgrade to 2.0)
1) Select "Options..." from the Tools menu
2) Go to the Feeds tab
3) Choose the "Subscribe to feed using" selection
4) Then select the reader that you want to use from the list
5) Now, go to the blog that you want to import the feed of
6) Click on little orange icon in the address bar
7) If it's a blogspot blog and you want to get a feed for the comments too, then replace the word "posts" in the URL with "comments", put that in the address bar, and hit enter.
Here's an example from Jenni's blog: The URL for the feed of her blog is http://jennijohansen.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default so the URL for the feed of her comments is http://jennijohansen.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default.

For those of you that use that use Internet Explorer (hopefully IE 7), then here's Microsoft's wonderful set of info about it:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/tour/rss/

Sorry, Mac users I don't have that much experience with them so I can't be of any help, but Macs are so user friendly and intuitive that you shouldn't need any help (I kid, I kid).

Google Reader
For those of you that decide to use Google Reader as your RSS Reader, then I would recommend that you have it sort everything by oldest first (it's retarded and sorts by newest first for some REALLY stupid reason that I will never understand). You can do this by clicking on the "Folder Settings" button in the upper right and then choosing "Sort by oldest". You have to do this for every single feed (once again something that is unbelievably stupid) or you can just always click on the All Items thing and do it there.
You can also add "tags" to each of the feeds. The tags let you sort the feeds into a folder type structure and then you can look at groups of feeds using the tags. Not necessary, but it helps keep things organized.