Wednesday 11 February, 2004

Bloglines

While surfing around yesterday looking at different blogs and pondering on what makes a good blog in preparation for Kultainen Kuukkeli, I came across another useful blogging tool. It's called Bloglines, and it's one of those services that you can use to keep track of all the blogs you follow.

Pinseri is a good one - but obviously only follows Finnish blogs, and is maintained manually (which is good because it caters for all types of blogs, but bad because it makes it slower when it comes to new blogs because it needs a human to maintain it). Bloglines is totally automatic which makes it really fast and convenient, but it requires blogs to have an RSS feed which means that blogs that are not maintained using some blogging tool like MovableType can't be added to the list.

However, most blogs I follow have this, so I've decided to give it a go to make it easier for me to follow non-Pinseri blogs. Don't worry if you don't know what an RSS feed is - you don't need to know with Bloglines. You can just bookmark a script that you can run (i.e. click) on your favourite blog and it will search for a feed for you. If one is found, all you need to do is confirm the addition to your blogroll and you're done. You can the view your blogroll and it will show automatically when new entries have been added - very easy to use. It's also possible to make your blogroll public (have a look at mine for example) in case you want to share it, or include it in your own blog with a simple include statement. Unfortunately the site is not very intuitive when it comes to some of the functionality, but a little digging goes a long way.

But anyway if you read more than one blog regularly, I suggest you have a play.

Posted by kolibri at 11 February 10:02, 2004
Comments
# 1 - Marnie (on February 11, 2004 04:30 PM):

Hey, that's cool! I read quite a few Blogs, and I usually depend on watchthatpage.com. All it does it let you know when a site has changed, so it's not necessarily for Blogs. I like it though, because I like going to each individual blog separately. I like the whole blog 'experience,' which includes the layout, etc. LOL. Yes, I'm a dork. :)


# 2 - Kolibri (on February 11, 2004 04:37 PM):

Well, I end up going to the sites most of the time anyway. With Bloglines it's easier though if you're reading many blogs - you can see with a glance what the entry is about and whether it looks interesting, and then prioritise :) So read (=visit) the most interesting ones first, and others later if you have time. Or leave them until I'm bored.

And it's not dork-ish wanting the whole experience - some people put a lot of work into designing their pages so it's only fair that you look at them :) There are some changes coming to D/k too - but we're waiting for some artwork to be finished first. It's gonna be sweeeet :)


# 3 - Marnie (on February 11, 2004 04:40 PM):

Oooo... anticipation!


You can't add any more comments, but if you wish you can email the author.