Bloglines has improved upon what was already an impressive and powerful RSS aggregator. In addition to the layout changes and the ability to automatically sort feeds, there are some cool new features, as well as some other features that I didn’t know about before. Here are what I consider to be the highlights.
Blogroll management – I now use bloglines to display the list of blogs I read in the sidebar (like blogrolling.com). I had started using Blogrolling, but whenever I added or removed a blog on Bloglines I had to do the same on Blogrolling to keep them in sync. Now I don’t have to.
E-mail subscriptions – You can create an e-mail address within bloglines and subscribe to a mailing list with that e-mail address. Then, when messages are sent to the list, they show up in your bloglines account just like new blog entries.
Recommendations – I’ve used this feature to find interesting new blogs. It shows you a list of blogs that it thinks you might be interested in based on your current list of feeds.
New blogs – Get a list of the latest feeds that have been added as a way to find blogs to read.
Your own blog – I haven’t done anything with this yet, but from what I read you can create your very own blog, hosted on bloglines.
Search – Useful when you remember something you read, but you don’t remember where.
Popular links – Find out what people are linking to most.
In summary, bloglines is getting better and better, it’s free, and I can use it anywhere instead of a desktop application that has to be installed on every machine I use.
Wow, they’ve really done good things with Bloglines! I first signed up just a month or two after they opened, and they weren’t very good. I put my whole OPML in there (I maintain a listing of interesting feeds at Syndic8) but I never really used it. I’ll have to check it out again. :)
I like the new features, especially the recommendations. My only complaint about the new design is that you can’t login on the front page anymore.
Hmm, I may have to check this Bloglines out.
Jan: I hadn’t noticed because I leave myself logged in, but that’s something they could easily change. Maybe you should e-mail them.
A minor complain I had is that to add a feed you have to click add, then enter the feed, whereas before you could just paste the URL right from the the blog reader. I don’t really mind though because I’m not adding blogs all that frequently.
Dan: You can paste Feed URLs directly into the search field on the home page (or any page) and select “Subscribe to URL” from the drop down menu.
Thanks Kirk, I don’t think I ever would have realized that.
Thanks for the tip. I’m off to check it out right now.