Train Your Dog – with RSS
For a very good guide to all sorts of dog training processes and dog behavior challenges, I use and recommend Clickertraining ...that link goes to the description of this terrific ebook you download immediately, wherever you are! -- Rosana
RSS doesn’t stand for Really Scrumptious Snacks, though it’s always a good idea to use them in training. RSS is an internet term, usually described as a shortcut for Really Simple Syndication. But this is a dog training blog, so why am I talking about this?
By using RSS and an online reader – I’ll be demonstrating with Google Reader, my favorite – you can keep up to date way more easily with your favorite online blogs, for dog training or whatever else interests you. In this article, first I will try to entice you into wanting to use RSS and then I’ll tell you how.
Some Dog Training Blogs I Follow via RSS
http://www.dogstardaily.com/blogs
This is a collection from quite a few different bloggers, on a site run by Kelly Dunbar, wife of Ian Dunbar, in other words you can expect top-notch positive dog training methods and ruminations here. Before I developed the habit of using their RSS feed, often several weeks would go by and I’d realize I was way behind in my reading. Now, I still can’t read it all but I can quickly pick out the articles that interest me the most.
http://www.theotherendoftheleash.com/
Patricia McConnell describes herself as "a certified applied animal behaviorist and dog trainer who is crazy in love with her dogs." She’s also known for her dog training books, DVDs, and workshops. I find her writing to be some of the deepest and most interesting that I regularly come across. Here’s a sentence that inspired me to increase my time spent training my dogs: "I think it’s awfully easy for advice about dog training to be easy to give if it’s theoretical, but an entirely different matter when you’re really living it." Food for thought.
http://blog.johannthedog.com/
http://blog.raiseagreendog.com/
These two delightful blogs are done by same dog… umm, I guess I mean person, but Johann’s is written so well from the dog’s point of view that I tend to forget there’s a person typing away!
I subscribe to several more but you get the idea. You can of course subscribe to my blog this way too! If you have signed up for my free ebook on clicker training and my Tuesday morning email newsletters, if you find you like RSS better than the newsletters, you can just unsubscribe from my newsletter using the link at the bottom of each issue.
How to Get RSS Working for You
[1] Go to a blog you like and look for the RSS symbol. It’s most commonly orange but can be any color. Here it is on the top right corner of this blog
Sometimes it’s a lot smaller, like this one from another blog:
And sometimes there is no image, just the words RSS Feed or even just RSS.
[2] Click on the symbol or the words next to it.. Then you may see something like this:
or you might see a page with something like this as part of it:
In either case, you are asked what RSS reader you want to use. I’ve used the Bloglines and the My Yahoo ones in the past, but lately I’m happy with the Google Reader.
[3] So choose whatever reader you want to use. If you use gmail as I do, you already have a Google account. If you don’t use any of the online Google services that require an account, I imagine you would be taken to a page to sign up. So let’s say that you have done that or have a gmail account. Then after you click on "Subscribe Now" in the top image or one of the logs in the lower one, you will probably see what I do at this stage… Here is part of the page.
[4] Click on Google Reader and you will be taken to your own Google Reader page. Here is what the top of mine looks like right now:
I know you can’t see it all that clearly at this size, but I just want to point out that on the left you will see a list of blogs you have signed up for. I have organized mine so that all the dog training blogs are together under the heading Dogs. There is the number (21) after the word Dogs above, and that indicates that 21 new blog posts have gone online since the last time I caught up in the reader.
[5] Using the Reader: On the right, you see the caption "Raise a Green Dog!", and that shows up there because I had clicked on that title over on the left. You can see that some of the titles under "Raise a Green Dog!" are bold. That’s because I haven’t read them yet. Just after the title you can read the first few lines of the article. Then if you are interested, you can either click on the title to read the rest of the article in the Reader or you can click on the tiny arrow on the far right of the line and the whole article will open in a new tab or window.
Some websites have their RSS feeds set up so you can only read part of the article in the Reader and need to click on that tiny arrow to see it all.
When you’re done reading a blog, just below the name of the blog on the right, click just below the name of the blog on the button that says "Mark All as Read," and none will be bold after you do.
[6] Make a habit of checking your reader. I do it a couple of times a day but then I am a bit of a nut about things like this. Whenever you do it, and how much you do it. matter less than that you get around to reading a bit of the inspiring and fascinating dog training material that is out there.
Well there’s lots more I could say but I am setting a record here for a long post. I do want to mention that Cynthia, who writes Johann’s blog mentioned above, told me on Twitter that she loves a Firefox plugin called Feedly where you can arrange your Google Reader contents. Haven’t tried it yet myself but will soon.
If you liked this article, please let me know! I could do one on Twitter for sure and maybe some of the other ways that dog lovers connect online. But now, it’s time to let my dogs train me to go outside and play with them!
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