Things 8 & 9: Bloglines or iGoogle or Safari or Mail or...

I've had a bunch of favorite blogs to follow for quite awhile, so I've been subscribing in various ways, but never using Bloglines. I've had fun poking around with Bloglines, and really enjoyed Cindy's post about that. I completely agree with her about how wonderful the Subscribe Bloglines button is. Unfortunately, I don't think we can use it on the computers at work, because the toolbars are locked down there. At home, I use Safari as my browser, and it's a simple task to drag that button onto my links bar where I want it!

Safari makes it extremely simple to subscribe to an RSS feed. The little orange button appears in the address bar of any item that you can subscribe to. When you click on it, it reopens the window giving you the option of subscribing in links (which appear in your favorites, or the links bar at the top of the screen. It looks like this:

Or, I can click the Subscribe in Mail link, which will send that feed to my Mail program, where it will look like this:

In Bloglines, the screen for the same feed looks like this:

The actual blog looks like this:

It might be alright to read a newsfeed in Bloglines, or through the Mail or Safari links, but I prefer to go to the actual blog, whenever the content has anything to do with art. I find that the blog author usually has set things up to show his or her artwork to best effect by the way they've designed their blog. Reading it through a reader is not going to give me that experience!

When this Web 2.0 project first started, I "followed" several blogs, which is another way of subscribing. I decided that was too cumbersome, and instead set up my iGoogle page to show me the blogs that I'd like to follow. That page looks like this:

I can quickly see if there's an update to a blog, and then click on the plus sign to see a preview, or if the blog author has given their post a title, click on the title to open the post in a new window or tab.

My iGoogle page has another tab on the side, called "Home," in which I follow well known blogs, and have gadgets that I like to use, such as Worldcat and Library Thing. My log-in for iGoogle at work, is my library e-mail address, so the content I have is all stuff that I like to use for my work. It looks like this:

As you can see, there is yet another way to subscribe to blogs, which is shown in the middle of this page. It's Google Reader. I tend to use that method of subscription for blogs that I like to keep aware of, but perhaps won't read as religiously. It's very easy to click "Mark All As Read," and move on. There's only so much time in a day, and I like to keep some of my reading time for books!

I'm not sure which is the best way, but I'm glad there are so many options!