Bloglines

I finally got around to trying Bloglines last week. It's great! I realize this is not news to my techie friends, but I want to spread the word to the less techie readers of Runtime Log.

Bloglines is a FREE web-based service that watches for new posts on multiple blogs. It keeps track of new posts so you don't have to constantly visit your favorite blogs only to be disappointed when there's nothing new. It's especially useful for monitoring blogs with infrequent or sporadic activity.

The heart of Bloglines is the nifty outline shown in the picture. It lets you organize blogs by category. Blogs (or categories) with new activity are shown in bold type, with the number of new posts in parentheses. To read new posts, you simply click on the outline entry. When you do this, Bloglines shows just the new posts in a separate frame.

Reading a blog with Bloglines causes it to be marked as completely read, but you can remember a post you want to get back to by checking a box labeled "Keep New". In the picture above, I have marked two Software Development posts as "Keep New". This is indicated by the numbers in gray parentheses.

If you read lots of blogs, Bloglines is a great way to organize them and save time. And if you have your own blog, you should look at it with Bloglines too. It will look slightly different. You might be interested in how some of your readers are seeing your blog.