While at work at another school the other day I became frustrated with the effort required to keep up to date with all of my friends’ sites and various other sites on the web that I read. I had access to a computer so I began checking out feed readers. I tried out the interface or at least looked at the website on many of them. I was using FeedBurner as a reference because they give a whole slew of options for subscribing to feeds when you pull one up at the site.

In the end, I settled with Bloglines. It is a web-based feed reader that is incredibly easy to work with. Although I initially resisted feed readers in general because I didn’t like having to click into different folders and having to view each feed separately, I may come around because Bloglines makes it so easy. My prior preference was for aggregators in the fashion of LiveJournal Friends pages or the feed aggregator built into Flock. When I install the Bloglines Toolkit for Firefox it makes life so easy by putting a “Subscribe to this Page” option in the context menu and putting a notifier in the browser window. I know right away when something new is published.

A feature that I just explored last night has proven quite useful already. Bloglines allows you to set up unlimited numbers of email accounts with them, which is particularly useful for subscribing to mailing lists. Mailing list subscriptions will never flood my email account anymore, and I don’t have to worry about being spammed.

I know Jessica started using Bloglines yesterday when I was telling her about it, and I noticed that Jacob uses it. I recommend it to anyone who tries to stay on top of many different sites.

Check out my subscriptions here. Subscribe to me here.

technorati tags: bloglines, feeds