Tuesday, March 11, 2008

How do you read blogs?

I'm curious about how you all follow the blogs you read. Do you all use RSS feed readers? I used to use Bloglines, but switched over to GoogleReader a few months ago. Bloglines was fine, but I think GoogleReader makes it a little easier to manage your feeds (deleting, adding, filing). Plus I use so many other Google products (blogger, gmail, googledocs) that it's easier just to remember one password. Which I'm sure is all part of their evil plan to take over the world, but hey, I'm lazy.



Do you use a feed reader? Which one? And how many blogs do you follow? I'm currently subscribed to 55 blogs. As you can see from the picture, the unread list piles up fast. I've been completely away from the Internet for only 5 days, and I have 82 unread posts. Eek!

18 comments:

Wendy said...

Oh look - I'm your screen shot!

I use Google Reader, and it has changed my life! It's allowed me to keep up with more blogs now, then back in The Old Days, when I just randomly hopped around. Um, the only problem is that I currently subscribe to 115 feeds. It gets kind of messy if I skip a day or two of blog hopping. I resort to a lot of skimming!

nath said...

Nice screen shot :D

I use Google Reader too... my only complaint is that it doesn't work well with my browser... but it's my computer's problem, not google reader. LOL, you should have seen how many posts Ames had!! LOL, I think over 500 :P

by the way, you're done reading Fire Study?

Jennie said...

Wendy--Yes, you are on my screen there. ;) Feed readers do save a lot of time, but then you end up reading more and more blogs. I do a lot of skimming too.

Nath--I haven't finished Fire Study yet! It's been a really bad week for reading -- no time at all. *cry* But I should be able to finish it up tonight. I'll email you my thoughts tonight or tomorrow. :)

Marg said...

I use Bloglines and subscribe to 100s of blogs. Mostly I just skim the posts, but I just keep on adding more blogs. At the moment I have 300 unread posts because I didn't read them all last night. It will probably stay at around that mark until the weekend when I have time to skim through all the posts there.

I did take some time out on the weekend and delete a whole heap of links of people who don't post to their blogs anymore or where the blog has been deleted.

Anonymous said...

I used to use Bloglines but I too switched to Google Reader. I'm subscribed to like 92 feeds...on THIS email :). I have another email for my teen lit review blog and I subscribe to a bunch of YA blogs and author's blogs.

Anonymous said...

I'm on Bloglines - I opened a Google Reader account way back but preferred Bloglines. Can't remember why now :-)

I've 142 feeds, though some of those are old ones - need to do what Marg did and do a clean-up at some point. I don't think I could manage without a feed reader!

Jill D. said...

Well, I guess I do it the old fashioned way. I have a folder in my bookmarks for just romance blogs and just visit that way. Hmm, I may look into google reader, I always wondered what it was.

Marg said...

Jill, using a feed reader will transform the way you read blogs. You know exactly which sites have updated just by looking!

Nicole said...

I also use Google Reader and love it. It has made me a bit bad about commenting, although I've been trying to do that more. I really enjoy using it. I have hundreds of blogs, though and need to pare down the amount of author blogs I have on there since I don't pay attention to most of them.

Also, I love that Blogger now has the comment notification thing.

C2 said...

I use Netvibes and I like it - it's pretty simple, I think. I probably should try Google Reader but I'm lazy right now. :-D

Jennie said...

Sounds like I subscribe to less feeds than most people. But I start to get twitchy when I've got a zillion unread posts. ;)

Jill--You should definitely try GoogleReader of Blogines. It saves a lot of time because it tells you when there are new posts that you haven't read. Plus you can read posts from all your blogs in one place and you only have to actually load the individual blog if you want to comment. Though, like Nicole says, this can make you lazy about commenting. ;)

Kristie (J) said...

LOL - I do mine the old fashioned way - but going down the list on my sidebar and often following other posters I haven't 'met' before on other blog comments

~ames~ said...

Love that screen shot. :P

I use google reader and I checked it halfway through my trip (about 5 days) and I have over 800 posts. I quickly went through and marked several blogs as read, knowing I'd eventually get to them, and brought it down to 300some. Whew!

Nicole said...

I get twitchy too, when they get so long. I often get the 1000+ warning. So um, I need to go through and delete the blogs I don't check. At least it has a thing to make all feeds read. That helps.

Chrisbookarama said...

I use Google Reader too. Instant gratification!

Joshua said...

I use Akregator, a local feed reader (i.e., it runs on my computer), and apparently am subscribed to 166 feeds. There's no way I read them all, though; some aren't even valid any more (but I keep them around for the archives), and the ones I do follow I usually skim looking for interesting things.

Current unread count is 1,208 articles. I'm very bad about keeping up on things outside my Authors folder.

I know I should delete some of them because I never care about them, but there's always the chance that something good will come up. Eventually it starts to be about opportunity cost, though...

Unknown said...

I just discovered google feed reader and love it!

Keishon

Rowena said...

I used Google Reader at work, it's great, it keeps me in the loop with all of my favorite blogs (you know the usual romance book blogs) the only downside is I can't comment!

*sigh*