BeginnerMac.com

Twitter is all the rage right now. And for good reason. You have probably heard the terms “twitter”, “tweet” and the such in regular conversation. Well, what exactly is Twitter, and why should you get in on the action?

In my opinion, one of the things that sets Twitter apart from blogging or any other kind of social networking, is that you can post updates from your cell phone (also referred to as SMS). This means that when you are out and about, you can send a text message to a short code, and your Twitter account is automatically updated.

If you are on Twitter, you can follow BeginnerMac at @beginnermac. Or you can follow my personal Twitter feed at @jwilli.

If you don’t have a Twitter account, what are you waiting for?!?! It’s free! So go here and sign up, then come back and follow this feed and this feed.

Blog…blog…blog…you’ve probably heard this term all over the place nowadays. Well, what is a blog?
Very simply, a blog is short for a “web-log” or in simple layman’s terms…an online journal. Think of it as a digitized diary. If you want to really know more about it, you can check it out here.

So…why a blog?
Blogs are different from websites in the fact that they are essentially a reverse-chronological series of thoughts. Websites can change what they want to put on the front page, they can manipulate the structure of the listing of pages and topics. Blogs, for the most part, are a “stream of consciousness” weblog.
Another thing that sets blogs apart from websites are that (for the most part) blogs are run by individuals, whereas websites are maintained by companies and businesses.

I like this blog, so what do I do?
Well, you have a couple of choices. Reading blogs for me is like reading a new edition of a newspaper everyday. And because you have a Mac, getting multiple blogs into one location for you to read is simple and easy.

Here is how you do it:

There are a number of different programs/applications out there that are designed to aid you in reading blogs. There are good ones, and there are bad ones. I’m going to recommend what I use personally that just also happens to be FREE.

1. Go to www.google.com/reader and sign up for a free Google Reader account. If you don’t already have a Google account, it is free to sign up. You will just have to fill in the required information such as username, password, etc… If you do already have a Google account, you can just log in.
2. There is a button in the upper left corner, right under the Google Reader logo that says “Add Subscription”. After you click that button, and bar pops up. That is the bar that you paste (for example) http://www.beginnermac.com, or the appropriate blog you are interested in subscribing to.
3. Click the “Add” button and you are done!

There is another way to do it once you have a Google Reader account set up. I’ll explain that here:

Anytime that you see a logo that looks like this, all you have to do is click on it and you will be walked through the steps to subscribe to that particular blog. On BeginnerMac, ours is right on the upper right hand corner of the site. See it? Cool, now click on it! There, now wasn’t that easy?

Now all you have to do is find some more blogs that you enjoy reading and subscribe to those as well. Then when you’re ready to read all you have to do is go to your blog reader (i.e. Google Reader) and enjoy!

Questions? Please don’t hesitate to comment on this post.