Ways To Keep Up With Personal Finance Blogs – RSS,Carnivals, And More

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There are so many wonderful personal finance blogs out there dispensing great experiences and information – How does one keep up with it all?

My two favorite ways are using RSS and reading carnivals. But before I get to those I want to show you a couple of other methods I’ve used.

One way is to bookmark each of your favorite sites. This is what I did in the past. If you are really organized you can set up different folders per subject. You can even save sites to Delicious or Google Bookmarks so you can access them anywhere. This isn’t the worst way to keep up (the worst might be trying to just remember them all) but I think you can do better.

Another method could be to find one good site with a great blogroll and use their blogroll as a type of bookmark system. This is another method I used to use. You find one site, track down the sites on their blogroll, check out the sites on the new site’s blogroll, ad infinitum… Fun at first when discovering a site the first time, but time consuming when you want to check back on a specific site. (This is a great way to discover sites though. Check out my Blogroll for some great sites).

This leads me to RSS Feeds

What is RSS? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Basically it’s a way to create your own sort of reader’s digest of your favorite sites. Instead of bookmarking each site you can subscribe to them. When I check My reader I can see if the site has any updated articles, how many posts there are, and the title of the posts to see what catches my attention. You can either read the article in your reader or click the reader link to go to the site. “Ok, I’m in. How do I do it?” you ask. You see that funny looking orange box to the right? That’s what you click to subscribe to a site’s RSS feed. You might find it somewhere on a site’s page or up where the website’s address is displayed in your toolbar. Now don’t go clicking it yet. You first need some form of feed reader. This will be the place where you can find your new feeds. Personally I use Google Reader and I love it! I can even check what’s in my reader on my cell phone. For me a RSS reader is a must have. There is no way I could go through bookmarks of all the sites I read.

Seriously, I think a lot of people don’t understand RSS but would really find it useful if they tried it!

Pheww! Now that you’ve heard how great RSS Readers are how else can you find out what’s going on in the PF blogosphere? I like to check out blog carnivals and festivals to see what’s going on. At a carnival (a festival is really the same thing) a host displays recent articles that other sites have submitted on a range of subjects.This is a great way to to see what many sites are writing about in one spot. Some favorite carnivals of mine are: Carnival of Personal Finance, Carnival of Money Stories, Money Hacks Carnival, and the Festival of Frugality.

One last mention. Alltop.com is kind of a reader of readers. It lists the last five articles from various sites and subjects. It’s like a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening in a particular field. Check out their Personal Finance page. You might find some familiar sites!

So there you go! You can bookmark or check out blogrolls but really the best way of keeping up with personal finance blogs (or any other subject really) is to subscribe to the sites with your RSS reader. Other cool ways to follow the PF blogosphere are reading carnivals and Alltop.

Do you have any other methods?

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