In today’s business world, it can seem impossible to keep up with all the news out there.  The internet has made information simultaneously easy to access and overwhelmingly plentiful.  The best way to keep up with the trends and important goings-on in your industry is to read the content being published by reputable and relevant blogs; but how can you manage the task of checking every day to see if there’s new content you haven’t already read?

feedly to the Rescue

Before I discovered feedly, I had moved from feeling overwhelmed by the blog-keeping-up task to essentially giving up and not reading my favorite blogs consistently. feedly (with a lowercase f) is an rss feed aggregator. (Don’t worry too much about what that means: that’s another blog post for later…you can read this excellent one-page summary if you want to know more now.)

By pulling together content from all of your favorite sources and allowing you to specify that you only want to see fresh content — articles that you haven’t already seen — feedly makes it much easier to keep up with all the news you need to know.  I currently follow over 100 blogs using feedly, and I’m able to keep up with them daily (partly because not every blog posts every day, and partly because I am able to tell from the headline and the excerpt that feedly shows me whether or not I want to click through and read the entire article). For me, it’s the modern-day equivalent of reading the morning paper.

Sound like something you could use?  Here’s how to get started using feedly to keep up with your online reading.

How to Get Started Using feedly

Go to feedly.com in your browser, or find the feedly app in iTunes or the Google Play Store (no Windows app yet…).  I’ll use screenshots from the browser version here, but the apps look similar enough that you can follow along easily if that’s where you prefer to work.  If you download the app, it will sync to your desktop once you’ve logged in both places.

Below is a screenshot of what you’ll see when you first land on the page. Click either of the Get Started buttons to get started — easy so far, right?

Either Get Started button will lead you to a screen where you can either create your own account (with the Continue with feedly button), or log in using one of your existing accounts from another app.

 
Once you’ve logged in or created your username and password, the main page will show you a search box where you can enter a specific blog name, site url, or topic you’d like to explore (feedly can show content from sources other than blogs, such as podcasts and YouTube channels, but I’m going to keep it simple here by just using the term “blogs”).  If you’d rather see what feedly has pulled together, you can choose from one of their pre-selected content categories called Starter Kits.

Scroll down a little further on the main page, and you’ll see some Shared Collections that you can choose from.  These are just a different way that feedly has organized content, through sharing the collection of sources created on feedly by various experts or thought leaders.

 For our example, let’s enter a content category of our own to explore.  In its Starter Kits, feedly has a Business category, but let’s get more specific by entering “small business” in the search box.

feedly suggests a couple of top feeds that fit your search term, but let’s just hit enter and see what comes up.

The resulting screen shows summaries of blogs that fit our criteria.  Within each box, you’ll see the blog title, a short description, a screenshot of a recent article, the number of people following this blog, the approximate number of articles published each week (use this to gauge how realistic it will be for you to keep up), and finally whether the articles within feedly will include the full text or an excerpt (meaning you’ll have to click through to the website if you want to read the rest).

Let’s go ahead and add one of these blogs to our daily feed.  To do this, click the plus sign in the blog’s box.  We’ll add Entrepreneur to our feed (one that I actually do follow, and whose articles I often share with my followers).

Once you have clicked the add button, you’ll notice that the sidebar allows you to make a few changes before you complete the process.  You can, if you want to, change the displayed Title for a feed to something that makes it easier for you to recognize.  You can check the Promote to Must Read box to add articles from this blog to a special section in your feedly interface.  And you can create a Collection name that specifies which category you want to see this blog under — this can be very helpful if you want to separate out personal interest blogs from business ones, or if you have more than one business you’re following trends in.

Once you complete your changes (if any — you can leave the suggestions that feedly offers if they meet your needs), click the green Add button to complete the process of adding this blog to your feed.

Now your sidebar shows that you’re following the Entrepreneur blog, and the main part of your feedly screen shows the latest articles from the Entrepreneur feed.  If you want to keep adding more blogs, the Add Content button brings you back to the search page to continue building your feed.

You’ve Got Options

Below this section on the sidebar, you’ll find links that let you customize your feedly experience. Organize lets you change the order of your followed blogs and/or categories, as well as delete sources you no longer wish to follow.  Integrations takes you to a page showing options for linking feedly with IFTTT (another thing you don’t need to worry about for now if you don’t know what it is).  Themes offers color options for your feedly interface.  Preferences contains options for font size and type as well as other customizations.  Recently Read takes you to articles you’ve recently read (bet you could have figured that one out on your own, right?).  Go Mobile will take you to a page where you can download the feedly app.  Finally, the usual Privacy Policy and Terms of Service links.

If you click on the gear icon at the top of your feedly page, you can access other options that change the appearance of your main page, including the format articles are displayed in, marking all articles as read (handy if you get so far behind you think you’ll never catch up and just want to start over!), and the sort order of your feed display.

That’s all there is to it!  Let me know how you like feedly if you try it, and if you have any problems setting up your feed, just contact me and I’ll help you out!

When two words sound exactly or essentially the same, it can be difficult to remember which one is the correct spelling for your intended meaning.  Here are a few commonly confused pairs, and some hopefully-useful little tricks for remembering which is witch which.

• Dessert versus Desert: One of these is much tastier than the other.  The trick: dessert is the one you want two helpings of.

Incorrect:  I hope they still serve desert at that hotel in the dessert.
Correct: I hope they still serve dessert at that hotel in the desert.

• Your versus You’re: “Your” is a possessive, and “you’re” is a contraction for “you are.” The trick is to try saying your sentence with “you are” in place of each instance, to see if you’ve used each one correctly.  If “you are” doesn’t make sense, then it should be “your.”

Incorrect:  Make you’re choice once your sure.
Correct: Make your choice once you’re sure.

• Effect versus Affect:  Affect is a verb and effect is a noun.  So something can affect something else, causing an effect.  Two tricks for this one: 1. remember that affect is an action (verb), both starting with a, or 2. the thing that affects something comes before the effect it causes, just as a comes before e in the alphabet.

Incorrect:  The weather will not effect the outcome of the game.
Correct: The weather will not affect the outcome of the game.

• Stationary versus Stationery: The first means still or not moving, while the second refers to office or paper supplies.  Trick: envelopes are stationery (although they’re also often stationary, so, careful there… ;-)).

Incorrect:  He stood stationery in the stationery store.
Correct:  He stood stationary in the stationery store.

• Accept versus Except: To accept something means to say yes to it, or receive it, or to realize that it is true.  Except means, generally, not including.  Remember it with this trick: except involves an exclusion.

Incorrect:  I except that you like everyone accept me.
Correct: I accept that you like everyone except me.

• Who’s versus Whose: “who’s” is a contraction for “who is” or “who has.”  “Whose” is the possessive form of “who.”  The trick, once again, is to use “who is” or “who has” in your sentence, and if that makes sense, then the contraction would be correct.

Incorrect:  Who’s shoe is this?  If we find whose missing one, we can return it.
Correct:  Whose shoe is this?  If we find who’s missing one, we can return it.

• Its versus It’s:  Yikes, this one.  What makes this one extra-difficult is that it involves an exception to a rule.  So even if you think you know what you’re doing, you have to remember which way they decided to change things up.  “It’s” is a contraction for “it is,” while “its” is the possessive for a gender-neutral object.  Normally, both of those would involve using an apostrophe+s, so someone decided they had to be different to keep it from being confusing (nice try).  The best trick I’ve ever been able to think of is just to not use “it’s” when you mean “it is” or “it has.”  Use the longer form, and if the two words don’t make sense in your sentence, then it should be “its.”

Incorrect:  Its clear that the monster has made up it’s mind.
Correct: It’s clear that the monster has made up its mind.

• Loose versus Lose: OK, this one doesn’t really fit the category because they don’t sound alike, but they do get mixed up a lot, so I’m slipping this one in.  Loose means not tight, and lose means not won or not kept.  The trick is in knowing how the two different spellings are pronounced: if you know that moose is spelled like loose, you’ll be all set.

Incorrect:  Don’t loose sight of the moose, or it may get lose.
Correct:  Don’t lose sight of the moose, or it may get loose.

I know there are more; what have I missed?  Which are the sound-alike errors that you see most often?  Do you have any other tricks for managing the ones I’ve mentioned?  Share with us in the comments please!

images courtesy of pixabay.com and day2daybiz

It’s easy to make a buck.  It’s a lot tougher to make a difference.

Tom Brokaw

Keeping in mind that there are definitely different rules for different venues, differing “opinions” across sources, as well as different requirements based on the level of formality appropriate for the audience, here are just a few grammar rules I find are often misunderstood and can negatively affect my opinion of the writer who ignores the rule.

• I versus me when referring to yourself and other people:  The easiest (so simple, really) way to test which is correct is to try the sentence with the other person/people left out.  Would you say “Me went to the store” or “They will meet I in the conference room”?

Incorrect: She and me went to the store.
Correct: She and I went to the store.

Incorrect: They will meet Mark and I in the conference room.   
Correct:They will meet Mark and me in the conference room.

• If and wish take were: In a conditional clause — such as one where you are using “if” or “wish” — the form of to be that is correct is the conditional, or “were.”

Incorrect:  I wish the meeting was earlier.   If only I wasn’t here.
Correct: I wish the meeting were earlier.   If only I weren’t here.

• Fewer versus less: Fewer refers to something clearly countable, such as items in the grocery line (only a few stores get this one right!), while less refers to something a little more fluid, such as time.  Incidentally, this makes it possible to have a sentence with the phrase “many fewer items” in it, which can sound odd, but is nonetheless correct.

Incorrect:  This line is for customers with less than 12 items.
Correct: This line is for customers with fewer than 12 items.

 
There are, sadly, quite a few more grammar offenses that give me pause, but this will do for now. Stay tuned if you want to improve the professionalism of your writing!  Meanwhile, what are your grammer pet peeves?  Share with us in the commments please!

images courtesy of pixabay.com and day2daybiz

Enthusiasm is the sparkle in your eyes, the swing in your gait, the grip of your hand, and the irresistible surge of will and energy to execute your ideas.

Henry Ford

Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it’s not all mixed up.

A.A. Milne