Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Use Bloglines Already!

If you are here because I recommended you check out Bloglines, congratulations, I really think you're going to love this and wonder why you ever wasted time with bookmarks.

Using Bloglines is super easy, so don't worry if right now you think it's not right for you.  It will be....trust me. Without further ado, let's go!

What is Bloglines?

Mainly it's an RSS aggregattor.  That means it will take RSS feeds (headline data mostly, but any type of data sent in small chunks of data like Slashdot posts, News headlines, whatever) accumulate them in one place and let you browse them easily.  If you like that part enough to start using it, you can figure everything else out on your own.

Setting up Bloglines, in a few easy steps:

  1. Get an account by visiting the Bloglines Registration Site.
  2. Go to my public site.  If you already had Bloglines setup, this is pretty much what you would see except with your sites instead of mine.
  3. At the bottom, right click the "Export Subscriptions" link and select "Save Target As...".  Save this to a file ("export.xml" is fine) on your desktop.
  4. Log in to your bloglines (which should be empty).
  5. Click the "Edit" link located directly below the "My Feeds" tab.
  6. At the bottom, click on the "Import Subscriptions" button.
  7. In the window to the right, Click the "Browse" button, enter the file you saved, and click the "Import" button.
  8. You are done!  Just click the "My Feeds" button.  Now you will see all of my Bloglines feeds imported into your Bloglines.  You can add/edit/remove these as you like once you get the hang of using Bloglines.

Top 5 Reasons to use Bloglines:

  1. Save time! Don't visit every site you like every day or even multiple times a day.  Do it all in one place.
  2. Remove head knowledge! You automatically know if there is new content and how much new content there is!  This single feature not only relieves your brain from having to remember what articles you read where, but saves you immense amounts of time.  With all that time, you have MORE time to read other interesting stuff you never would have before.
  3. Track Packages!  This is amazing.  Put a package in and track it using bloglines.  Remember, Bloglines remembers the last information you saw, so if the package changes location, you'll know immediately.
  4. Discover the Tail!  Ever hear that phrase about Web content and Web accesses?  It says that the Web usage has a long "tail".  What this means is that besides the big popular news items, there's also a lot (a LOT) of little content too.  Because you can keep track of any site automatically, even if the traffic is low, you'll know immediately when new articles are available.
  5. Get Mobile!  This works so well when you are on the road if you have a mobile phone which can browse the internet.  Bored at the airport?  Read the latest updates on bloglines!

James Lee, a friend of mine also has blogged about why he switched to Bloglines, in case you need some more convincing ;-).

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