Next! And it was good.

Ever found something that you love so much, you wonder how you went without it? What's even worse is when this same something has been there for years, and you never even knew it wast there.

It's "Yay! This rocks. How the hell did I not know about it before now."

So ok, I've been using an RSS reader to follow the several hundred blogs / sites I keep track of for a couple of years now. I was all sorts of happy with myself about how much time it saved me, because I don't have to sit there clicking on all these websites every day just to see if there's something new. When it's new, it pops up on one site and says "Hey, look whats new today".

Using Google Reader it looks something like this :


But for all my love of reader there are two downsides. First, it's way to easy to just read the post and go on to the next one. If I want to comment, I have to click through and reload what I just read at the original site, and gee is what I was going to say really that important anyway? Much easier to just skip commenting and read the next post.

Second, and this is the one that really bothered me more, is that I never even see some of these sites. Because I'm reading the content in the reader window, I miss all the fun stuff - the sidebars, the polls and page layout and fancy work that makes each site special. And the comments - sometimes half the fun is in what other people said. (Just because what I was going to say isn't important, doesn't mean that what someone else had to say isn't!)

But wouldn't you know the people working at Google felt pretty much the same way? And came up with a way to use the beauty of RSS feeds - visit only a site that has new content - and still actually let me read the site at it's source?

Living with Lindsay has already written up a nice little post telling you how to get this working for your own Google Reader (it takes 'bout 4 clicks and 30 seconds and involves nothing more than dragging a bookmark up to your menu bar). And if her post ever disappears, you can just google "google reader goodie next bookmark" and find the simple instructions.

Google, what else don't I know you've already thought of?