Bloglines primer

I make the mistake of assuming that everyone already knows about Bloglines – but I’ve lately realised that many dedicated bloggers/blog readers don’t. So here’s my good deed for the week, a tip: if you follow blogs regularly and find it tedious to surf sites every day, do yourself a favour and get a Bloglines account. Registration is easy and you can then “subscribe” to any number of URLs, which means you don’t have to go to individual blogs to check if there’s a new post; just keep the Bloglines window open and you’ll get updates there. I started using the thing myself because my office computer at the time was this creaky creature from 1982, which would emit otherworldly groans and then hang if I tried to open more than one Internet Explorer window at the same time. So it was pretty much a necessity if I wanted to save on time while blog-surfing. Now it’s an enormously practical option because I like to stay in touch with what’s happening on around 90 blogs (that’s the current figure and it keeps increasing) and there’s no question of visiting each site. (As it is, I’m not much of a blog-reader, I just keep an eye out for stuff that’s of interest and glance through it.)

The flip side of using Bloglines is that you might still miss some interesting posts if you jump from one update to the next in a hurry. But then, the only real solution to that is to limit your blog-reading. The other disadvantage is that if you regularly track your “site hits” with Sitemeter, BlogPatrol etc, you might not want people subscribing to your site on Bloglines, because then you won’t have an accurate picture of how many visitors you get (unless Bloglines now has its own facility for tracking, I have no idea).