You see that button in the upper right hand corner that says “Subscribe?” How about the little orange logo or “RSS” button in your address bar? Ever wonder what those are there for?
SInce our new website is a blog, it’ll be constantly updated with new sermons, announcements, pictures, and more, and more. But you don’t really want to have to check it every day do you? Thanks to RSS1 – which stands for Really Simple Syndication, just in case you were wondering – you don’t have to!
If you’d like, you can subscribe to blogs via their RSS feeds through something like Google Reader. Google Reader is what’s called a feed reader. This is really helpful if you already read a lot of blogs or news sites. All blogs you find on the internet have RSS feeds, as do most news websites. So if you find yourself reading the New York Times, Slate, or the Washington Post every day, as well as a couple of blogs here and there, you may be interested in using Google Reader. For an excellent tutorial, you can click this link, courtesy Abraham Piper, of John Piper’s son fame.
But some of you may be saying, “Internet? I don’t use no stinkin’ internet.” You may not know what a blog is and may not know that you don’t have to travel to Manhattan every day to pick up your print copy of the Times, you can read it straight off the internet. For you, you may want to consider setting your homepage to Google’s customizable homepage. If you do this, you click the little button to the right, below the map, and it will allow you to add it to a Google homepage. You can also add boxes to show you the weather, give you a random Shakespeare quote, and lots more. Think of it: from one page, you can keep up with what God’s doing in nature, pithy things an Englishman said 400 years ago, and what’s going on at Southwest. Works pretty well.
And of course, if you use Facebook, you can keep up to date by becoming a fan of the church.
Hope that helps. If you have any more questions about what you can or can’t do, leave ‘em in the comments. I’ll be happy to help as best I can.
1As with all things internet, when something is called “simple,” it usually isn’t.
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nice post! Does this automatically upload to facebook?
It’s supposed to, but it hasn’t been for some strange reason. Dunno why. Oh well. It doesn’t show up in news feeds to the best of my knowledge anyways – pretty useless, unless you manually check it.