Welcome to the pond

Bloglines is working out pretty well for me so far. Once I got past the difference between it and My Yahoo! and figured it out a bit, I really got rolling with it. I've put in all my feeds that I normally read into it, and now I can instantly see if there's anything new on the sites I read. It's fairly easy to add feeds to your Bloglines service. All you need to do is enter the URL of the feed, or just the site itself, and it brings up a list of all the feeds associated with the site. Pick one, edit a few options if you need to, and click subscribe. You can also organize the feeds into folders, which I've done.

Bloglines lists all your feeds in a sidebar in the browser window. Next to the name of each feed is a number in bold. That number is the number of unread items for that feed. Click on the feed, and the main window displays a list of the latest items posted by that particular site. You can customize whether you want to see just the headlines, or read the entire article. This is especially helpful if the site is loading slowly for you, or not at all.

Once you've clicked on a feed, all the items become "read" and the number disappears from your feed list. You can choose to display items from a particular time frame if you want to read past entries that have already been "read," or you can even mark a particular item as "new" if you want to read it later.

Overall, I find Bloglines fairly easy to use after you figure out how to set it up. I do, however, miss the My Yahoo! setup of having the headlines listed under each feed name. I'll get used to it though, no doubt about that. The only problems I've had so far involve Flickr feeds. For some reason, their feeds never seem to update right away, if at all. Oh well. Other than that, I like Bloglines so far.

Keep in mind that I, too, offer a feed for my blog. Just look for the Feedburner icon on my sidebar. Copy the address from that, plug it into your feed reader, and you're good to go.

I'm most likely going to see King Kong tonight, so I'll catch you all tomorrow with a couple memes (if they are posted). Maybe a mini-review of King Kong too. Or maybe something completely new and different.