Friday, March 31, 2006

Tech: Keeping up with all those blogs

Over the past few years the number of blogs I have been reading has steadily grown, with there being over 40 art related blogs that I was checking up on at least once every two days along with a handful of other blogs of interest to me. As you can imagine this eats up a lot of time, only to see that most of the sites you were checking on had not been updated. Well after some hesitation and a bit of reading up on them, I decided to try a blog aggregator, also called news aggregators. There are numerous ones available and most have useful features, just search them out on Google. The one I have been useing recently is Bloglines. Keeping up with all those blogs has now become much easier and time efficient.

What Bloglines and other aggregators do is search regularly for updates by each of the blogs and news sites you have added to your customized folders. They then let you know at a glance which site has been updated and how many posts since last you looked at the site. I can only speak on the options available on Bloglines as I have not tried any others, but I can say that I highly reccommend you using an aggregator of some sort if you read a lot of blogs and news sites. After all most of the aggregators I have read up on are free. Another tip, I now use my aggregator page as my homepage when I log onto the net. This way I can see all those updates instantly with minimal clicking. It only took me a couple minutes to figure out how to add the sites I wanted to my aggregator folder, and through a great option they have where I can see what other subscribers to a particular blog have on their list as well. I have found several new blogs this way that I had not yet known about. If you are like me and have been reading more and more of these sites and want to streamline your time at the computer, try one of these out. And if you have experience with other aggregators or tips for us blog readers, please let us know more in the comments section. Enjoy.

3 Responses to “Tech: Keeping up with all those blogs”

Anonymous said...
March 31, 2006 at 11:30 AM

I use bloglines to track about 45 blogs a day and it's made my life significantly easier (and less eaten up by blog reading time.) They also have some great tools for clipping what you want to keep and blog about later.


ChristopherWestPresents said...
March 31, 2006 at 11:48 AM

Scott you rock. I had heard these things were out there but hadn't experimented with them yet. Looks like I know what I'm doing this weekend.


Anonymous said...
March 31, 2006 at 12:39 PM

I track a little over 200 feeds for various topics and interest so the folder option in Bloglines is extrememly helpful. Absolutely recommend.


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