I have been uncomplainingly waiting for the friends feature to return, but it looks like it may not, so I pushed into the world of RSS to keep up with new posts by my homeschool mom friends. It does have a few advantages such as being able to now see new posts by homeschool moms who are on other blog sites.

For others like me, I thought I would give a quick tutorial.

1. How to I select a friends blog for a feed?  Most of the blogs have an RSS Feed link in the sidebar under the category of links. Just take the link and click "subscribe to feed'. Some other blogging sites will make the feed icon in the toolbar of your browser 'light up'. If it is 'lit', then you can just click it to get to the subscribe page.

2. How do I know when a friend has a new post and where do I go to find it?  In my IE browser, I have a tab under "My Favorites" (where you bookmark webapges) that is designated for feeds. I click the tab and all my bookmarked feeds are listed. If the titles are in bold letters then that site has had a new entry. I haven't yet tried a feed service or aggregator, but if I understand correctly they can chime you the second an update is posted or be set to e-mail you updated as you chose to schedule them. Personally, I kind of like the manual method so I don't get distracted until I know I have time to enjoy reading.

A few Homeschool Bloggers do not have Rss Feeds turned on. If you want to add them, just comment their blog and ask if they would be willing to turn it on. Nine times out of ten they didn't know about the feature or thought they had it on already. If you are not sure, just click the "My RSS Feed" link under your sidebar's "Links" category. If the page is blank, your feed is turned off. To turn it on, just go to your control panel and look for the feeds control.