I follow about 80 blogs on a regular basis. I read about 10 online news sites. I am following some Flickr sites and some Yahoo!discussion groups too. If I were to go to each of these sites every day, it would take up lots of time. Also, I might go to some blog and find that it is not updated. It would be good to have a service that keeps track of all our favorite blogs.
The developers of popular blog services started building features on their software that automatically generate some thing called a RSS feed. (This file has information on the latest additions to the site’s content and this file is usually stored in a format called XML. For example click here to see my blog’s XML file.)
Most blogs and increasingly news sites, search engines and other web services are publishing these RSS feeds. People also started building tools called aggregators (also known as Feedreaders and Newsreaders). Aggregators can collect RSS feeds from many sites and present the fresh content from these sites on single page in a format that we can read.
One of most popular aggregator today is Bloglines. Bloglines is web based, you don’t need to download any software to your computer. Just create an account on their website and subscribe to your favourite blogs. You can then follow your blogs from a Mac at home, a Windows PC at office or a PDA at some airport.
This tutorial will show you how to sign up and subscribe to blogs with Bloglines. We will also show you some other interesting things you can do with Bloglines.
1. Signing Up
1a.
The first thing you need to do is sign up at www.bloglines.com.
Click on the Sign up link.
1b.
Bloglines asks you for your email address and a password. Make sure that you type in a correct email address as they will send you an email soon to verify your account.
Now click on the Register button.
1c.
Bloglines has now registered you, but it will send you an email to validate your account.
1d.
Check your email now. You will find a link on the email inviting you to verify your account.
Click on this line and your verification is complete.
2. Subscribing to Feeds
2a.
Make sure that your are logged on to your Bloglines account.
2b.
On this screen click on “My Feeds” on the top left corner.
2c.
Right now you will only see one “feed” - the default feed from Bloglines. We will subscribe to some more “feeds” now. Open another browser window and go to some blog. I am going to this popular blog called Boingboing.net.
2d.
You will see a link that says “rss”. On some sites this may appear as an orange RSS or XML button. Some sites may just have a “Syndicate” text. All these things mean the same thing. Right click on this “rss” link and select “Copy Link”. If you are using Internet Explorer, the option is “Copy Shortcut”
2e.
After you have copied the link, move back to the Bloglines window. In the left pane, click on the “Add” link.
2f.
Paste the URL that you copied into this “Subscribe” text box on the right pane.
2g.
Click on the Subscribe button. You will get a new page that summarizes some details of the feed that you just entered. We can just leave this page as it is. Scroll right to the bottom of this page and click on the Subscribe button again.
2h.
Now if you look at your left pane, you should see this new feed. The number in the bracket indicates the number of unread posts.
Click on this link.
2i.
On the right pane you will see the recent posts from the blog that you just subscribed to.
3. Subscribing to Feeds - Even easier method
3a.
Now lets try adding another blog. I like this blog on Japanese popular culture and I want to subscribe to it. Open another browser window and type http://www.peterpayne.net/.
Copy the site’s URL
3b.
Return to Bloglines. On the left pane click on the “Add” link.
3c.
On the right pane we see the Subscribe text box. Paste the URL into this text box and click on the subscribe button.
3d.
The next screen shows us some details.
Click on Subscribe button and this site’s feed will now be listed on the left pane.
3e.
You might be wondering why we did not copy the link to RSS like what we did with the earlier Boingboing blog. Well, Bloglines is able to auto-detect the feed address if you supply it the URL of a site. I just wanted to show you the two different ways of subscribing to a feed.
3f.
Sometimes when you subscribe to a site in this way (copying and pasting the site’s URL), you might see many feeds.
Don’t worry about this. This happens because most sites publish their feeds in various formats. These formats are basically the XML file written in different ways. Some sites may also include feeds for the comments and other data. We don’t care about this, so just select the first feed. If you want, you can click on the preview link to see how the site looks like on your Bloglines page.
Again scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the Subscribe button.
3g.
It is even simpler when you want to subscribe to a site that is hosted on blogspot or livejournal or xanga.
Here I want to subscribe to a blog called http://lifeatngeeann.blogspot.com. So I will just just enter the blog name (lifeatngeeann) in the appropriate box. Bloglines knows about these popular blogging services, so I don’t have to type in the complete address.
Similarly you can subscribe to blogs on Xanga or Livejournal by just typing the site name in the specific box and clicking on the button next to it.
3h.
Some blogs also offer feeds for the comments. I subscribe to my blog’s’ comment feed. It is a good way of keeping track of what comments are coming in.
4. Bloglines as your research assistant
4a.
We want to track what people are talking about Kim Jong il - the North Korean leader. Lets go to a site called Feedster.com. We will run a search on Kim Jong il.
4b.
Here are the search results.
Note the orange coloured XML icon on the middle right of the screen.
4c.
Right click on this and select “Copy Link”. On IE it is “Copy Shortcut”
4d.
Go to the Bloglines window. Under “My Feeds”, click on “Add”. Paste this link inside the Subscribe text box on the right pane.
Click on Subscribe. The next screen will give you some details on this feed. Remember to again scroll to the end of that screen and click on the Subscribe button.
4e.
On the left pane you will see a “Feedster: Kim Jong il” feed. If you come back tomorrow and click on this link you will see some new items on Kim Jong Il.
5. Bloglines and Flickr - Subscribing to people’s Flickr photo albums
5a.
I want to be able to follow some Flickr user’s pictures just the way I follow blogs. I like the user Airchild’s pictures, so I will go her Flickr page.
5b.
I will copy the page address from top and paste inside my Subscribe text box.
5c.
Again we get several feed options.
We will just select the first one and click on the Subscribe button. (remember you can always preview the feed just in case you are not sure which of these feeds to select)
5d.
This is how the album looks like when viewed in Bloglines.
6. Subscribing to a Flickr Tag
Flickr Tags are a good way of keeping up with pictures on a particular topic. I love the Chinese city of Chengdu and I want to be able to see any new pictures of that city posted by any Flickr user.
6a.
Go to the Flickr home page. On the top line you will see a link “Tag”.
Click on this link. You will get a search box. Type in Chengdu or any other keyword you want.
6b.
Flickr will come back with the search result.
Now copy the URL of this page and paste it in Bloglines. (like what we did in step 5b and 5c above).
7. Subscribing to news sites
7a.
Lots of news sites have started adding feeds to their sites. Here I am at BBC new’s Asia Pacific news page.
I am copying the URL.
7b.
And I pasted the URL into the Subscribe text box.
Subscribe to the feed just like the earlier examples.
8. Subscribing to Podcasts
8a.
Lots of people have started doing regular audio programming or Podcasts on the web. Bloglines lets you subscribe to these Podcasts (think of Podcasts as audio blogs). Podcasters usually display the URL of of their podcast’s feed on their sites. For example this is the Dragon Radio blog - run by Tony Reno in HK and podcasting Asian music. I located the podcast feed and here I am copying his feed address.
8b.
And I pasted the URL into the Subscribe text box.
Subscribe to the feed just like the earlier examples.
8c.
This is how the podcast feed looks like within Bloglines.
At the bottom you see that “Enclosure” link. This “Enclosure” is like an attachment. It usually contains a mp3 file - the audio content of the podcast. You can click on this “Enclosure” link to play the audio or download the content onto your computer.
8d.
If you are looking for more Podcasts a good place to look is Podcastalley.
9. The Bloglines bookmarklet
9a.
Thanks to Ashwin and Deepak for pointing this out. You can actually add a Bloglines “bookmarklet” to you browser. A bookmarklet lives on the bookmark bar of your browser. They are small Javascript programs that can automate some of the repetitive tasks or add new functionality to your browser. Check out the left pane of Bloglines.
Click on the “Easy Subscribe Bookmarklet”
9b.
On the right pane you will see these instructions on using these Bookmarklets. For Safari, Netscape and Firefox browsers you can just drag the button the bookmark bar of your browser. For IE the process is slightly different and listed in the instructions.
In my case I am using the Safari browser, so I will just drag this button to the bookmark bar of my browser. It will stay put there for your future use.
9c.
Here I am on the slashdot.org site. I want to subscribe to the feed on this page.
I will click on the “Sub with Bloglines” bookmarklet on my browser’s bookmark bar.
9d.
Bloglines will show me the the feeds available on the page.
Just select the feed that you want and click on the Subscribe button.
10. Yahoo! Groups
Some Yahoo Groups open up their messages to the public.
If you see the orange XML button on your Yahoo! Group’s main page, then you can subscribe to this group’s feed. Just click on the “Sub with Bloglines” bookmarklet we tried in step 9. If you don’t have the bookmarklet on your browser, just copy and the URL of this Yahoo Groups page and paste in on Blogline’s Subscribe text box. (see step 3)
