Keeping Track Tutorial (NaMoBloPo #15)

Sister Diane of CraftyPod has been looking at keeping up to date with what your favourite bloggers are doing. I'm going to share what I do.

She mentions an aggregator called FlipBoard and this is what I use. It's a free app I've got installed on my phone. You can use it to keep track of multiple media sites, or not, as you desire. For me the main use is for keeping track of blogs. This is my first screen when I open the app.

The top section is what the app decides are the top stories from all the other boxes you have. Then below that I've chosen to have UK news and Technology news. I can touch any of these to go into them in more detail. Then this is my second page of the app (I only have 2).

From the top I've got Science news, Flickr uploads by me and my Flickr friends, Google reader (this is the one I use most), Craftzine, Twitter and Facebook. It's Google reader I'm going to concentrate on as it makes keeping track of blogs so amazingly simple.

First up you need a Google account. I defy you not to have one already. If you use Google+, blogger or gmail account you've already got one. If by some chance you don't just click here and create one. If you do have one go to http://www.google.com/reader, click on the red 'subscribe' button and think of a blog you enjoy reading. Type or copy and paste the blog address into the box and click 'add'.

Simple!

Now the clever part. Open your Flipboard app and one of the grey squares will say 'More'. Tap it then select 'Accounts' and 'Add an Account'. This is where you add your Google Reader account details.

And that's it. Now, whenever you want to see what's new with the blogs you follow you open Flipbook and tap your Google Reader square. It will bring up the most recent updates. So for example...here we have something from the book guru Knitting on the Green.

It gives me the main pic and a few lines of text. To read the whole post I tap and it opens up. I can comment on and read other posts if I want to. If I don't want to read the whole post I just stroke the screen to flip it upwards and move onto the next most recent post.

And that's it!