Welcome to the MERIT blog.
We’ve set this up to keep our membership base up to date on the type of work we have coming up, regarding networking events, training courses and various other projects we are running.
As this is the first entry for the blog, we thought we would touch upon a free tool you can use to subscribe to this blog (and others you may care to read in your daily web-surfing routine). As far as online feed readers go, one of the best out there is Google Reader (www.google.com/reader), the set up time for this is less than ten minutes and means that instead of trawling the web looking for updates to your favourite websites every day, through Google Reader, you are alerted when the content of your favourite websites are updated automatically, “feeding” the information through to you, saving you precious time. As Google Reader is an online tool, you can check for these updates from any computer in the world which has access to the internet.
First of all you will need to register a Google Account. This can be an existing e-mail address and a secure password of your choice. The usual verification processes are in place here, but if you want to keep everything in one place, sign up for a Google Mail account also (http://mail.google.com) to have a @googlemail.com domain name for your Google Reader account. That is just another option for yourself to decide.
So you have set your Google Reader account up. Now it’s time to subscribe to some websites you visit on a regular basis. At the top left hand corner of the screen are some headings telling you how many articles of content you have yet to read. You also have the ability to add a subscription to your Google Reader.
To add a subscription to the website you want content feeding through from, click the Add subscription link and a dialog box will appear allowing you to copy and paste the link to the site. In this case, http://meritnw.wordpress.com/.
This will then add the feed to your list of subscriptions in the left hand pane. Every time the MERIT blog is updated, you will be alerted to this by the subscription turning bold alerting you that we have news for you to read.
Repeat this process for all of the websites you regularly visit who have the facility to feed content directly through to you.
There are many other online feed readers out there, like Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/), News Alloy (http://www.newsalloy.com) and News Gator Online (http://www.newsgator.com) but for us, this is the best suited to our needs regarding how quick the feed loads into the page, amount of information available on the panels and ease of use.
Tags: Google Reader, MERIT, meritnorthwest, Merseyside
