Setting up Bloglines
I’m giving up–at least momentarily–on my two main aggregators. One is a desktop client on my, well, desktop, which happens to be on a laptop that’s out of commission. The Manila aggregator attached to this blog hasn’t been working well for me for a while. It hasn’t updated in a few days. After another blogger and I were complaining about it, I decided to take some action.
I started a Bloglines account in the fall to show during some presentations. I know lots of people who seem pleased with the service. I hadn’t done much with it because I wasn’t able to figure out how to import an OPML file (that’s the outline processor markup language file from an aggregator that has a list of subscriptions) in less than five minutes of clicking around and reading the help documentation. Tonight, I found their instructions. (Why the option to import a list of feeds is under "Edit" and not "Add," I can’t explain.)
*Poof!* Now my Bloglines account has the 78 subscriptions from this blog. (78! I thought I had like 30. This aggregator certainly hasn’t shown 78 sources lately …) The nice thing about importing OPML files between aggregators is that I don’t have to resubscribe to those 78 sources individually. I also don’t have to remember which sources are in that OPML file.
Figuring out how to share my Bloglines account was a little tricky. The wording of the documentation doesn’t clearly say what users should do. To enable sharing, go to Account > Blog Settings, enter a username, which becomes part of the URL, select to show the blog, then save the changes. I kept looking at the blog options thinking, “I just shed about twenty blogs. I don’t want to get another one.” For some reason, I wasn’t thinking that Bloglines uses a blog backbone for people to share their aggregators. The process would be easier if the blog options explained that enabling the blog is how to share subscriptions.
It looks like I need to clean out the list. There seem to be some dead feeds there. Also, there are quite a few I should add.
You can even grab my subscription list as an OPML file if you want to read what I read.
If you don’t want me to display your feed publicly in my Bloglines account, please let me know.
