For those of you unfamiliar with
Bloglines, it's the best feed reader on the block these days. For those of you not familiar with feed readers, they're programs that allow you to syndicate the content of all of your favorite sites onto one website, saving you hours and hours of time clicking on bookmarks. If you happen to be familiar with
My.Yahoo, Bloglines is similar, but takes My.Yahoo to another level by displaying all stories that are new on your favorite websites since your last visit and only the stories that are new since your last visit.
For example, you may visit your local newspaper's site more than once a day to scan for new headlines. But what if your newspaper's site could push their newest headlines directly to you? That would save the time involved in looking for what's changed since your last visit, getting you straight to the stories worth reading (or at least scanning).
What are Feeds? A large percentage of websites, including news sites and blogs, use databases to maintain their content. This allows them to publish a file listing the latest updates to their sites. This file, called an RSS file, generally contains the latest headlines and stories from a website with links to the site's stories. Programs like Bloglines read and aggregate, making it easy to stay up to date on information that is important to you. If you'd like to see what an RSS file looks like, you may view Technology Evangelist's at
www.technologyevangelist.com/index.xml. It's not pretty, but feed readers like Bloglines convert this cryptic code into human-friendly content.
How to use Bloglines?
Bloglines, and other feed readers like Bloglines, are very easy to use. First, create an account at www.Bloglines.com. They require an e-mail address and password. Once registered, you'll be able to subscribe to hundreds of popular websites, including tech sites, blogs, news and political sites.
To subscribe to a website, click on the "Add" link within Bloglines, then paste the URL of the site you'd like to subscribe to into the Feed URL box. Feed URLs may generally be found under links labeled XML or RSS, but this varies from site to site.
Once you have more than a handful of subscriptions, managing them within folders becomes a wise choice. The screenshot below is from my Bloglines account and displays a group of folders I use to help sort my feeds:
Each folder contains a series of websites I've subscribed to related to that particular subject (defined by me). The number on the left is the number of unread stories in each folder. The number to the right is the number of stories I've saved in each folder.
Clicking on a folder in the above menu structure displays the stories I've subscribed to. As you can see in the screenshot above, I'm currently subscribed to 103 different feeds. Rather than spending a good part of my day continually visiting those 103 sites, I simply login to Bloglines to view what's changed on all of those sites.
Bloglines may also be used to subscribe to retail websites to check regularly updated information, including airfares to your favorite travel destinations, the latest products you wish to buy, and the latest show times from local movie theaters.
If you're a fraction of the news junkies we are, Bloglines will be a valuable tool to help you keep up with what's going on in areas that interest you.
