Feed:
Did you know that you can read every post we put up without ever actually coming to Pillar on the Rock? Feeds are one of the best tools available for people who read frequently updated sites (like ours). Once you've subscribed to a feed, a reader will automatically gather all your subscriptions in one place to make it easy for you to read them. That could prove useful if you decide you really like some of the other sites we link.
We both use Google Reader, and highly recommend it. To set up Reader, you'll need a Google account. If you already have a Gmail account or a login for iGoogle, that will work. If you don't, you can sign up at Google Reader, and accounts are free, no strings attached.
Once you've signed in, you'll just need to add our site. In the upper left-hand corner of the page there's a link that says, "Add a Subscription." Click on it, and type in our address (www.pillarontherock.com). You can do the same for any other site with an RSS feed, usually indicated by the same feed symbol we use. From that point forward, just login to Google Reader, and you'll find all of the new posts on your subscriptions waiting for you.
If you want even more info on setting up Google Reader, including some of the neat tricks available, you can see this CNET article.
Friend:
Facebook is the most popular social networking site in the world. It does everything from hosting pictures to helping you organize events with friends. We import all of our posts from Pillar on the Rock as "notes," and post our Twitter updates to our Facebook wall. Both notes and wall posts will show up in the Facebook news feed, a collection of the facebook activities of every person you're Facebook friends with and every Facebook page you're a fan of (like us).
Follow:
Twitter may be the "next best thing," but many people don't really understand it. Twitter, like Facebook, is a social networking tool. Unlike Facebook, it only really does one thing: short spurts of information. Every "tweet" is a 140-character message. The result is a lot of short snappy messages about what people find interesting. To make it easy to see what other people are saying, you can "follow" them—basically subscribe to everything they're saying—and their tweets will show up on your home page from that point forward. (Follow us!)
Of course, that means it can be used in a lot of ways. And really, who wants to know that someone is going to the bathroom? On the other hand, hearing short, encouraging thoughts from Godly people can be very encouraging.
Since there are far more good articles on the web than we have time to write up full-length posts, we point to some of them with twitter posts. When people say something insightful on Twitter, we "retweet" them. In the future, we hope to be able to begin posting our own thoughts more regularly throughout the day.