What is a blog and how do I use one?
What is a blog?
Well, a blog is kind of a running newsletter. We will post news, sales, etc. about Treasured Locks and you can visit a website page to read them. A blog will usually allow you to leave comments for the blogger. You can reach our blog by visiting us at http://blog.treasuredlocks.com Our blog will not take the place of our regular newsletter. But, it will be updated much, much more often and the newsletter will have links back to the blog.
A really cool thing about a blog is you can subscribe to it through a pretty new technology. This is even better than subscribing to our email newsletter because the blog is updated more often. And, you can leave comments on the blog for us and for others. But, the best thing about subscribing to our blog is you can be updated without filling up your email mailbox. You do not receive email notifications when a blog is updated. You use something called a NewsReader that gives you a notice when there is a new post made to a website that you are interested in. You then visit the site and read the news.
How to subscribe to a blog
Subscribing to a blog, if you’re not familiar with newsreaders is a little tricky. Hopefully, it is going to get easier as the technology matures and the capability is built into browsers. It’s already there for the Macintosh in Safari. But, for Windows, there are only a few options now:
If you use Yahoo as your homepage, you can click on the My Yahoo icon at the left side of our blog page and that will add the “feed” to your Yahoo homepage. You’ll see it just like your news headlines. This is a very, very easy way to do this (assuming you are using Yahoo as your homepage). If you are not using Yahoo as your homepage and want to, visit Yahoo , click on the My Yahoo icon at the top of the page. Arrange the page the way you want and make it your homepage. Then, visit our blog, click on the My Yahoo button and go from there.
If you already have a newsreader (you’re probably not reading this), just make your way to our XML feed and add us. Our XML feed is at: http://blog.treasuredlocks.com/feed/
It is important to subscribe to the XML feed link and not the regular blog link. If you don’t already have a newsreader, this is going to be a little more tricky. There are several newsreaders available and they all work a little differently.
- Pluck is an integrated newsreader that installs itself in your browser. That’s nice and convenient. There are versions for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. We found it pretty easy to use. But, it’s supported by ads, which you might find annoying. And, in the short time we played with it, we could not figure out how to get from the article back to the main blog.
- Awasu is a stand-alone application (that also doubles as a browser). It’s kind of complicated. But, for Windows, we like it best. It allows you to click on an article in the reader to actually visit the website. Downside, is you have to download a separate application and run it and it was a little difficult figuring out how to get a feed into the reader. But, once we got our feed in, we liked the way it worked.
- NetNewsReader Lite is great. But, it’s for MacIntosh only. Very easy to use. It was bought by NewsGator. Hopefully, they’ll come out with a Windows version.
- Safari (also for MacIntosh) has a built-in reader.
- There are web-based readers, too, where you visit their site to find your news. NewsGator is one of those. We didn’t really like having to visit a site to find our news. But, it seems to work pretty well.
If all of this is way too confusing to you, don’t despair. You can always just periodically visit our blog at http://blog.treasuredlocks.com and read it at your leisure. Make sure you bookmark it.