I was speaking with someone yesterday via MSN and they asked me about how I could possibly follow so many trains of thought to keep 20 blogs on such a variety of topics updated. My answer was quite simple – Bloglines and the RSS feeds that I track there are one of the keys to my success.
betterdays has a helpful tutorial on Using Bloglines (or How to keep up with dozens of blogs everyday) which should give beginner users of Bloglines some helpful tips on how to use it in keeping up with many sources of information at once. It goes right from the sign up stage through to subscribing to feeds through to integrating it with other services like Flickr and Feedster.
It’s not rocket science – but for those who don’t know where to start with Bloglines this is a great starting place and will teach you the basic skills you’ll need to get the most out of the tool.
I love Bloglines. It’s not the only system of its kind but it does have a clear and simple layout, can do RSS feeds of search patterns as well as individual feeds, and because it’s online I can keep up-to-date with what’s new and what I’ve read, across several different platforms (I read blogs from at least three different machines throughout the course of a week). That’s harder with desktop aggregators though they have their place. I wrote briefly about Bloglines article limit on feeds which either means you need to keep checking articles all day, or avoid very popular feeds. Any thoughts?
Other than an online service, if you’re too lazy even to type the URL to Bloglines, many RSS programs out there now. *grin*
Bloglines also has its own desktop notifier but I got annoyed with it popping up all the time. I’ve just got too many feeds on the go…
Looked confusing to me.
It is confusing, especially when you just want to find how to export your OPML or sort your menus for the first, second and third time. Only then do you tend to remember where that option is… or is it just me? I think the interface sucks, but the reader rules. I still find it the most friendly on the eyes for scrolling through a lot of news fast. And with the Firefox Toolbox, its so easy to add feeds.
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I tried few rss reader softwares, but still using bloglines. It is good, it helps me keep track to hundred websites.
… maybe release your bloglines opml?
It’s worth learning to use their “Clippings” feature also. I keep clip folders for each of my weblogs and clip things into them, and the list of clips becomes a to-do list for blogging.