One of the main reasons that we wanted to update the website was to improve the connection between you and mission field. With the power of the internet, we this huge span has been closed to a few mouse clicks.
One of the easiest ways to keep up to date with the blog is with a < a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggregator"news aggregator. Think of it this way. The morning paper is a news aggregator of sorts. Instead of you having to run all over the city (or the world for that matter) checking out what is going on in the world, you read the newspaper. The newspaper is nothing more than a collection of stories from different sources.
With a news aggregator, you can subscribe to a “feed†from any source that you like. Our web feeds for this blog are on the sidebar to the right. Depending on the news aggregator software you use, there are various ways to subscribe to a feed. Check your software’s documentation for details. Once you are subscribed, you simply have to click on a button (or set it up to run automatically) and your news aggregator will go out and check for updates on all of the feeds that you have subscribed to.
What is the benefit? Well if the only feed that you are subscribed to is the CCM Blog, it will save you one or two mouse clicks. But if you are subscrided to 10 or 20 feeds, it will save you a lot of time and energy. You can see if any sites have updates and you won’t have to spend a hour going to all of the different sites. Look on all you favorite websites for web feeds (sometimes called RSS feeds or XML feeds). You may be suprised how many websites have them.
Can I still read this blog the regular way? Of course! If all of this is a little overwhelming, you can bookmark this page and just come back once a week to find out what is going on in Colombia. The benefit of subscribing to the web feed is that you do not have to come to the site to find out if it has been updated.
How much does all this cost? That is the best part of all. There are plenty of free news aggregators of their. Newsgator is a great website based application. Feedexplorer is a free desktop application that looks a lot like Microsoft Outlook. Here is a huge list of news aggragators.
Again please refer to the documentation of your news reader to find out how to use it properly as every one is a little different. If you have any questions about our web feeds, please post a comment to this blog post. I am subscribed to the post comments so I will know when you do.