Aslum asked our Question of the Week: which do you do first, read the book or watch the movie?. I ready slowly, so I usually see the movie first when there’s a choice.

The Answer of the Week was given by Sara L, who included the magic words “chain mail” in her response to Alexis Greenward’s request for storytime or craft ideas for special education teens.

Both winners get the signed Unshelved book of their choice.

Visit Unshelved Answers if you’ve got questions or want to share what you know. And please vote up good questions and answers.

I have never kept it a secret that I think RSS feeds are the most efficient and satisfying way to keep up on my strips, and the web as a whole. Instead of going to 165 sites every day to see if there’s something new, I go to one, Google Reader, and it shows me everything that’s new. I can very quickly scroll through dozens of items at a time, reading some, skipping some, and marking the rest with a “star” to read later.

You can also "like" items, which is what I want to talk about today. Once I've read everything in my list there's an Explore Recommended Items feature which shows me items I might be interested on. It bases this, in part, on items I've "liked" and items other people have "liked". It's the RSS version of Amazon recommending a book to me based on my purchase history.

But yesterday the value of this feature skyrocketed with the introduction of Google Reader Play which presents recommended items in a very compelling interface. And suddenly this reasonably popular Not Invented Here strip went through the roof, with literally hundreds of thousands of views. Most of those viewers kept on clicking past, but a few were intrigued enough to go to our website, read the archive, and subscribe themselves. And that is a good thing.

So if you find yourself laughing at one of my strips on Google Reader, please “like” it. It will help new readers to find my strips, and help you find new stuff you like.

P.S. If you’re a Mac user of Google Reader I recommend installing Greedy. Once you have you can subscribe to a website by clicking on the “RSS” logo in the address bar in Safari.

P.P.S. Here’s are the RSS feeds for Unshelved and for Not Invented Here