Three months ago I read about RSS feeds in this article. I had heard all about them but finally decided to investigate, so when they mentioned Feedster, which I had heard about here and there, I decided to try it. It wasn’t too easy to use but I found out that my default MT template for my RSS feed was truncating the posts. It didn’t look like the other boys and girls on feedster were doing that so I included the entire entry and made sure it still validated with Mark Pilgrim’s RSS (and Atom) Validator.

I didn’t use Feedster much, but then I discovered Bloglines and was almost immediately hooked. I’ve been using it ever since to do all my blog reading and it has made it much easier for me to keep up-to-date on the blogs I read. In fact, instead of trying to reduce the size of my blogroll, I’ve begun increasing it because it’s so easy to read them now. I wasn’t able to read Blogger blogs until I learned that they can all provide Atom feeds as long as users turn it on in their settings.

I’m extremely pleased with the number of blogs I can read now in less time than it took for me to go shift-clicking down my list of blog links in Opera, opening each one up in the background.

Here are all the sites I read using bloglines.

Update: Dave Shea wrote a helpful explanation of RSS in case you want to learn more about it.