Why Subscribe?

If you’re the type of person interested in saving time, and you’re not afraid to invest a little to get a lot, you might be interested in this. It’s not that difficult, and the payoff is that the content on We Teach We Learn comes to you, as opposed to you always having to check to see if we’ve posted something new here. A subscription just saves you the time, frustration or disappointment of checking a blog only to find that nothing new has been posted. Plus there’s less of that clicking around business

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a quick lesson: Basically there are two ways to subscribe to a blog, with a feed, like this:

Feed:
Subscribe in a reader

and/or with an email subscription, like this:

Email:

If you click on the feed here:
Subscribe in a reader

or above, you’ll be taken to a page where you’ll be asked to follow a few instructions and probably sign up for a free account. This is where your investment of time comes in. One of the questions you’ll be asked is what feed to use. I use Google Reader, but it doesn’t really matter. You can play around with them to see which you like best.

What happens after you’ve subscribed to a feed is you can bookmark the feed site and visit it to see if I’ve posted anything new. You can also read the content there as well if you want. Normally, the pages load a little faster from a feed than on a typical blog home page. It often looks a bit different but you still are able to get all the latest content.

Now I can hear you saying, “Yeah, but Chris, how does this save me any time? I already have your site bookmarked. Why would I want to bookmark a feed site just to see your post?”

The answer is that you can add as many blogs to your feed as you wish. So instead of visiting and exiting out of each blog you like to visit to see if they’ve posted anything new, you can visit just one place. If we’ve been doing our job, We Teach We Learn will have a number next to it informing you how many new articles we’ve posted since the last time you’ve visited. If nothing’s there, ignore us and move on. Maybe Joe Blow, another of your favorite bloggers, has posted something new.

Another benefit for some, depending on the blog your visiting, may be simplicity. We Teach We Learn has a lot of different places for us to post new content. We might put it in the “Elementary” or “Features” or “Leadership” or “Lesson Plans” section. Depending on how familiar you are with We Teach We Learn, you may or may not notice that we’ve posted something new somewhere on the site. A feed will solve that problem for you.

If you don’t visit that many blogs, this may not be worth your while. However, if you are frequently checking 3 to 5 (or more) blogs for updates, a place to “one-stop-shop” will save you some time.

Depending on how web-savvy you are, subscribing to a feed can feel a bit complicated. Subscribing to an email subscription, on the other hand, is pretty self explanatory. All you really have to do is enter your email into the form provided,

jump through a few quick hoops by following the instructions and replying to an email, and bingo–you’ll start getting an email every day we post something new.

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