I have a set of scripts which allow me to bring up many instances of Internet Explorer with blogs I'm interested in reading. I'll start a script, go off and do something like have breakfast. Then when I come back to the computer I'll have twenty or so blogs up that I can quickly skim.
Bruggie Tales recently posted about Bloglines. I've seen Bloglines mentioned before but haven't felt a need to use it. I can see two advantages, both having to do with time. As I understand it one main advantages is Bloglines uses RSS and would allow me to bypass the time it takes a computer to bring up a blog. Bloglines is also helpful in that by checking with Bloglines every couple hours you can quickly find any new posts on your favorite blogs.
Are these the main reasons for using something like Bloglines? Are their other reasons?
Thanks for any suggestions or advice.
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Technorati tags: blog, Bloglines
10 comments:
Personally, I liked bloglines because I can add and access my feeds from any computer (home, work or away). I must confess I used to check it everday. However, I now use the Firefox browser that lets you keep "live" RSS bookmarks.
Besides bloglines, Yahoo, google and others do similar things. (Bloglines just does it better.)
Of course, you can always rely on http://homeschoolbuzz.com/blogwatch.html
;)
I think you summed up the main advantages pretty well. Bloglines is a hugetimer for me in that I don't have to wait for my browser to open each of my favorite blogs just to check if they might have a new post. New posts are automatically gathered and quickly accessed, and I don't waste time checking blogs w/no updates.
A small disadvantage is that you won't see links and other sidebar material - sometimes you can miss out on relevent info. But often even this is an advantage, as there are fewer images, bells, and whistles to slow the download time.
I also like bloglines for the folder capabilities. I can categorize my blogs into different subject matter. Homeschool blogs, news blogs, etc. I can also mark some posts as "new" which keeps the constantly appearing when I click on that particular blog. This helps me remember links to past posts that I will most likely reference on my blog at some future time. I find that a very helpful feature.
The other reason, is Bloglines just implemented a search capability. So you can search all the subscribed blogs for a given topic. At the moment it seems pretty outdated on a few links, but I think over time that could prove to be very useful. Currently I use the Google blog search.
Technorati is also setting up a favorites feature. I haven't played around with it much to see how it compares to bloglines.
I can never remember which blogs I've checked recently for new posts and which ones I haven't. Bloglines takes care of that for me. Honestly if a blog doesn't publish a site feed, I most likely won't return because I won't remember to check back.
on the other hand, there's a good bit of lag time between blog updates and bloglines showing the entry (a couple hours) so if time is of the essence, then keep up with the actual site. A different advantage (IMO) is that if someone posts a blog and then removes it, it will still show up in bloglines even thought it is no longer on their site.
I don't use bloglines, but I have an RSS reader built into firefox.
Really, move away from IE. I can check all of my feeds in one window (due to tabs), and so many other wonderful things that you can't do in IE.
Bloglines has been the easiest for me to figure out!
I like bloglines for reading lots of blogs...especially the news feeds. Most of mine are set to show the first several lines of the post which is nice for skimming quickly for what you want to read. But you kind of have to know the blogger, too. Not everyone starts with a formal "lead" to pique interest so you can skip over something if their blog is set for the short version...am I making any sense?
Anyway, there is also a search feature within bloglines which allows you to find blogs among subscribers which are mentioning homeschooling...several pages of blogs comes up.
And you can go through, click the ones you want to visit to read more, view the links/graphics or comment on and continue reading everything else (it automatically opens in a new window). Then you have all the blogs up you want to see more carefully when you are done.
I use google reader but it probably does the same thing as blog lines. I like the fact that not only can I get to the articles quickly, but also I can star them, add my own tags, share what I'm reading by tag or star or pull up what I've read by their tags when I want to pick something to blog on.
There's also a "blog this" option that I've been considering trying. It pulls a summary of the article right into blogger with a link to the full article. I haven't used it yet because I tend to pick weird parts of an article to quote when I blog and I've been doing a decent amount more writing than quoting lately.
I noticed bloglines after looking through my referrer lists in Sitemeter and statcounter. I am seeing more people pop over to my site via bloglines just after I load a post, so I had a look. Now I use bloglines too!
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