Ok, that’s not exactly true. Blogs can take hours of your time by keeping you glued to your computer when you could be outside enjoying the beautiful weather. But, on the other hand, certain blogs can be an incredible source of doctrine, news, ideas, etc.
Well, my friends, now you can enjoy the sunny day away from your computer while reading your blogs. The secret is RSS. It may sound strange and a little scary, but you don’t have to completely understand what RSS is to reap all the great benefits of it. For a simple explanation (this takes less than 4 minutes to watch) check out “RSS in Plain English.” Let me clarify: there are many “RSS Readers” out there; I am specifically talking about an RSS Reader for the iPhone. The application I use (it’s free) is NetNewsWire. If you don’t have an iPhone, there are other RSS Reader options here.
Basically, RSS (“Rich Site Summary” or most commonly translated “Really Simple Syndication”) allows you to “subscribe” to a blog or other Web sites that offer an RSS “feed.” After you download NetNewsWire, or something comparable, to your iPhone, complete the easy sign-up for a “feed reader” (I use NewsGator) and plug in the blogs you enjoy online (my blog choices are below), new posts from that blog will automatically show up on your phone whenever you go to your reader.
Net News Reader is by far the most used application on my iPhone. You can skim a large amount of material fairly quickly (it also offers a “mark all as read” option, if you get behind and you’d like to restart with a clean slate). I highly recommend this.
Here are a few blogs I enjoy:
- Albert Mohler’s Blog
- Between Two World’s (Justin Taylor)
- C.J. Mahaney’s View From The Cheap Seats & Other Stuff
- Challies Dot Com (Tim Challies)
- Desiring God Blog
- EdStetzer.com
- Freakonomics Blog (A blog written by economists that illuminates apparent mysteries of everyday life by asking the right questions and drawing connections. Great blog.)
- JD Greear’s Blog
- Joshua Harris’ Blog
- Merely Theological (Geoff Ashley)
- Of First Importance
- Shepherd Press Blog
- Take Your Vitamin Z
- TheResurgence Blogs
- What’s Best Next
- Worship Matters (Bob Kauflin)
- Seth’s Blog
- And of course, all The Village Church blogs on this Web site.
Enjoy!