Last night my brother was giving me a hard time because I have not been updating my blog very often. He said that he was losing interest. I told him that he should just use a reader and then he wouldn’t have to come to the site everyday to see if there was anything new (this is not intended to excuse my failure to post more frequently…).

I know that most, if not all, of you who read this could easily figure out how to set up a reader account on your own. But, I thought that if I gave an abridged version, it might encourage some of you who have always thought about using a reader, but never have, to give it a shot.

In this post, I will give you an idea of what a reader is, and then tomorrow I will walk you through creating a google reader account.

But first, what is a reader? A reader is like an email account, except that it collects articles from blogs that you subscribe to. Your reader will automatically put in your “inbox” any new content from any of the blogs that you subscribe to. You can save posts that you particularly enjoy (this has the added benefit, if you are a blogger, of serving as a way to flag things you want to link to later) and sort through your “messages” by blog, by whether they have been read, or however you want to go through it. One of the most important things about this is that it is all free! The reader itself is free to use (at the one I will recommend is) and all of the blogs that you subscribe to are free to subscribe to.

Second, if you have not used a reader, a word of caution – don’t get too excited right away and subscribe to everything. I subscribed to some of the bundles that google offered and quickly got overwhelmed when I first set up my account, because if I didn’t check it everyday, I knew there would be hundreds of things to sort through. Start small, and you can always add subscriptions as you get the feel for it. (Most importantly, subscribe to deeply committed!)

Interested? If so, check back tomorrow morning for an easy tutorial on how to set up a reader account.