TIHFU – Things I Have Found Useful: RSS Feed

Here’s the first of a new series of features – TIHFU, or Things I Have Found Useful. I hope you will find it useful too!

First up: my RSS feed. I swear, if I could, I would have my RSS feed’s babies. It saves me so much time and effort you wouldn’t believe, and it also provides day-long entertainment, all for free!

For those who don’t know, and believe me I was one until not too long ago, an RSS feed is an internet widget you can set up to collect together blog posts from any website enabled for it – such as pretty much every blogging site, among others – and put them in a place where you can retrieve and read the posts, all without having to trawl every blog, every day, searching for updates. It’s free, too, which is always a bonus! I use Google Reader as part of my interactive google homepage, and I have to say I have never had any issues with it at all. It’s wonderful. You can set it up outside of a google homepage, though, if you don’t want one. Just google it, as it were, and sign up.

If you look at the address bar of this site, you will see a little orange box with three curvy white lines in it sitting at the right-hand side. That symbol tells you the page is RSS-enabled, and if you click it, you can add the page to your RSS feed. Anything added to that page will then appear on your feed. Neat, huh?

The main thing I use my RSS feed for, of course, is reading writing blogs.

Editors, authors, literary agents – I’ve got them all added to my RSS feed, and I read every post they make. Why? Because it’s absolutely the best way to get an understanding of the publishing industry and what they want, so that when I submit I’ll get it right. And they give out some excellent writing advice, too, which never hurts. Some agents even run contests on their blogs, offering critiques or manuscript-reads to the winner. Why wouldn’t you give it a go? You have to be noticed somehow.

Here, copy/pasted in all its glory, is the list of all the blogs I’m subscribed to. Go take a look – you might see something you like!

101 Reasons to Stop Writing
A Newbie's Guide to Publishing
At Last! Writer Beware Blogs! AC Crispin and Victoria Strauss Reveal All!
Beaver and Steve
BookEnds, LLC — A Literary Agency
Buzz, Balls & Hype
Cute Overload
Girls read comics
I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?
Nathan Bransford - Literary Agent
Neil Gaiman's Journal
PostSecret
Pub Rants
Rachelle Gardner, Literary Agent
Reading Under the Covers
Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
So You Want to Be Published
Story Sensei
The Rejecter
Writing Fiction Right from novelist Gail Gaymer Martin


By the way, a handy thing I found out today – did you know that if you press the CTRL key at the same time as scrolling your mouse scroller, you can change the font size on any webpage you’re looking at? It’s awesome for when people have just sized things wrong, or you’re having trouble reading. Just remember that it applies to any other page you then navigate to, as well, so remember to change it back.