Sometimes when I stand in front of a mirror, I wonder who the the old guy with the white beard is.  My birth certificate confirms that I’ll turn 57 a week from today.  Wow!  How did that happen?  Many people my age are contemplating retirement, but I feel as though I’m just nicely getting going.

Every day, fresh insights and amazing new digital skills come my way.  In fact, it often feels as though my world of possibilities is expanding at an an almost overwhelming rate.  I’ve never felt so excited about my professional development.  Perhaps the most significant factor in all of this is the wealth of enriching stimuli that arrive on a daily basis via the internet.

I appreciate the power of Twitter and other social/professional networking vehicles, but blogs make by far the most substantive contribution to my personal and professional development. Reading blogs challenges and extends my thinking in countless ways.  Blog writers lead me to all manner of wonderful and very practical resources.  Still other bloggers help me learn how to apply what I discover.

There is such an abundance of worthwhile blogs to choose from that my biggest challenge is to pare what I   read down to manageable proportions.  I keep learning of new blogs that I really want to follow.  Bloggers have a wonderful way of sharing and linking to the blogs that they most appreciate.

So, there is probably no digital tool that I value more than my RSS aggregator, or “Reader”. This is the tool that  enables me  to subscribe to blogs and then to keep track of what I’ve read.   My reader offers  a set of organizational options that provide incalculable time savings.  After starting with Bloglines a couple of years ago, I’ve settled on Google Reader.  If you haven’t yet got around to setting up a reader, I encourage you to do it soon.  This small investment of time and effort can pay huge dividends.

If you are new to the concept of RSS and the notion of subscribing to blogs, you’ll probably appreciate the video by Lee Lefever called ‘RSS in Plain English‘. For help with setting up and using Google Reader, I suggest the excellent screencast tutorial created by Andy Wibbels. Andy uses the example of using Google Reader to subscribe to a news feed from a major newspaper, which is yet another valuable function of the reader.

Maybe you’ve been subscribing to a blog, and noticed that for no apparent reason it has stopped coming into your reader.  Nothing is quite perfect in the digital world, and such glitches do occur.  Larry Ferlazzo, the author of one of my favourite blogs recently discovered that many subscribers to his blog had stopped receiving his posts.  Here’s what Larry has advised those subscribers.  This suggestion may be helpful in other situations as well.

Subscribers to Larry Ferlazzo’s blog who use Google Reader and Bloglines to get updated RSS feeds, and who subscribed prior to January, might have recently stopped receiving new posts. If that has happened to you, then you can go to his blog and subscribe to his newer Feedburner feed.

Photo Credit:  ‘contemplation’ by phitar