I received another email this morning which made a comment about ‘keeping up’ with reading blogs. For anyone who is just discovering blogs, at first it does appear daunting. You don’t have to click from blog to blog to see if your favourite authors have added anything new to their blogs.

What you need is an aggregator to read the material that has been recently updated. Now don’t run away thinking this is getting too technical just sit put for moment and listen to me. I have put on my nicest possible Mum’s voice as I am about to dish out some advice which I hope is useful.

Reaching across and pouring the coffee I continue …

To read a number of blogs you need to use a news aggregator. There are many available but I use Bloglines and I recommend it because it is free, easy to set up, and it is web based, meaning you can read it in your browser a bit like an email program. The other thing is there is no software to download and install. For textile people who are not into computers this is a big plus.

All you need to do is to go to the blogline site and sign on. Once you have an account, you can subscribe to the blogs you want to keep track of. One of the things about blogging software is that they produce what is called a syndicated feed or an RSS feed. In bloglines to add a blog to your account click the add button in the top left hand corner and paste in the URL of the blog in the form on the page. You are asked if you want it at the ‘top level’. This is because you can sort and organize your blogs into folders. If you don’t want bother with this just click OK and the subscription with appear at the ‘top level’.

If you are more the sort that likes to be organized you can create folders. For instance you may want to keep all the quilting blogs in a folder, or all the knitting blogs in another and gardening blog in a third. Create these folders by selecting new folder (to make one) or if the folder already exists select it instead of ‘top level’.

Click subscribe and you have subscribed to the blog. The title will appear in the left hand column. Next time you login you will see if the blog has been updated as the blog title will appear in a bold typeface if it’s been updated and normal type face if it has not. If it is updated click on the title and the recent entry will appear in the right hand column for you to read.

Once you have signed up to bloglines you will discover that one of the things about blogs, flickr etc is that this form of publishing embraces RSS - you don’t need to know a thing about RSS except that you can pull an RSS feed into your bloglines account. This means that in the case of flickr you can subscribe to a ‘tag’ such as ‘crazy quilting’ or textiles. When ever new images are put online by anyone who uses that tag the pictures will be pulled into your bloglines account for you to look at over your morning coffee.

To subscribe to these in bloglines simply add the URL displayed in your browser when you are on a particular tag page. It is possible to search for flickr tags or browse at the most popular tags.

With bloglines you can also discover other blogs as once you have a few subscriptions in your account bloglines will present you with a page of suggested feeds based on the type of blog you have subscribed to.

I hope I have explained it clearly but if not or if you want learn more take a look at this article on using Bloglines for further clear comprehensive instructions illustrated with screenshots which has been published by Preetam Rai.