Bloglines – Making Your Life Easier

Let me take one more minute of your time trying to make your life easier. For those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

Many of you have heard of Bloglines. Apparently not many of you actually use it on a regular basis. The only way I can say that is based on the information I receive on those who come to this blog. I am going to make this brief but hopefully you will walk away sold that using Bloglines is easier than what you are currently doing and easy to do.

What it does:

Bloglines allows you to subscribe to the blogs you like and in opening one single page you can look through all the blogs you read. In a glance you can see which ones have new information/posts and which ones do not. That allows you to only go to the blogs that have new information rather than going to the same blogs over and over again that have not been updated since your last visit. If there is something you want to read in more depth or visit that particular blog you can click on it and go straight to the blog itself or just read from the bloglines page.

How to:

First, dump Internet Explorer (IE). Don’t try to uninstall it because that isn’t such a good idea for the health of your PC. Instead switch to a better browser – Mozilla Firefox (or Safari). Firefox is so much easier to use than IE for many more reasons than I can list here. It is far more intuitive than IE and is much more compact. It has also been proven to load pages faster than IE and is more secure. Go here to download and install Mozilla Firefox.

Second, import your IE Favorites into Firefox’s Bookmarks. You will be prompted to do this during your Firefox setup.

Third, go to Bloglines and register.

Fourth, open the blogs that you regularly read (which are probably now bookmarked in your Firefox Bookmarks) and open them one at a time. Once you are at a blog you want go to the address bar and click on this icon. A web page will open that will have the following text: “This is a ‘feed’ of frequently changing content on this site…” There will be a dropdown menu that will say: “Subscribe to this feed using…” Click it and select Bloglines from the list. Check the box that says “Always use bloglines to subscribe to feeds.” Click, Subscribe. It will open up bloglines and give you some options about that particular blog that you can choose how to view it. You don’t need to change anything. Just make sure that you don’t need to check a box next to the blogs name in case there is more than one feed. Usually this is not necessary.

Fifth, repeat for all of your favorite blogs. Now all your favorite blogs are registered for you at bloglines and you can get to them from anywhere and quickly see which ones have posts you have not yet read. This eliminates how annoying it can be when you are not at your usual computer and don’t have your bookmarks/favorites with you. Now you can access the blogs you read quickly from anywhere.

To read your favorite blogs. Go to bloglines. Make sure you are logged in. Click the feeds tab on the left-hand side. Enjoy!

Have a look:

For a sample, view my Bloglines to see what it looks like by clicking here.
Try out subscribing to one by clicking here .

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