There seems to be a common confusion about registering on a blog vs subscribing to a blog. What’s the difference? Some blogs require registration in order to comment but registering does not guarantee that you will be notified of new posts or have them delivered to a reader or your email inbox. The one sure way to keep up with your favorite blogs is to subscribe. There are a variety of ways to do this.

Most blogs have the option on every page or post to subscribe and offer several ways to do it. On Fresh by Northwest the types of subscriptions we offer are located in the top right sidebar of every page. If you place your arrow or cursor over the symbol a text box will appear and tell you which type of subscription is being offered.

• If you follow a lot of blogs you may want to choose the first option: Subscribe via rss. If you click on that button you can choose from a list of selected “readers” that will gather up any new posts from blogs that you specify so that you can read at your leisure.

If you go this route you’ll have to choose one of the readers offered on the page shown above. If you don’t want to use one of these pre-selected readers you’ll want to use the app of your choice instead. Try googling “best blog reader app” to find out more about what apps are available for your device(s) and how they work.

I have always used Google Reader and I really like it but it will no longer be available as of July 1, 2013. I’m switching to Feedly now because it looks and feels almost exactly like Google Reader with a few more features. I subscribe to quite a few blogs and it is more time efficient for me to sit down a few times a week and read multiple posts rather than trying to keep up as they are published but I can check in as often as I like.

• If you prefer to be notified via email when there are new posts you’ll want to click on the second option: Subscribe via email. For some blogs the full post will be delivered to your email inbox. In the case of Fresh by Northwest you will be emailed an excerpt of the post in which the post title is a link that will take you to the full post on the blog. Simple, right?

• The Twitter and Facebook options will take you to our Twitter account or Facebook page depending on which one you choose. There you can “follow” or “like” Fresh by Northwest to have notifications of new posts (and other stuff) included in your stream. If you don’t keep up with these social networks regularly you will probably not always know when we publish new content.

So here’s one last thing….

I wanted to let you all know I’ve removed the option to register for the blog for security reasons, however, you can still easily comment on any post and we hope you will. At the bottom of every post there is a box for your comments.

If you don’t want to sign in via one of the options offered, simply type in your comment and use your name and email address.

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!