Creating a Bloglines Account

Creating a Bloglines Account

Modified from RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators by Will Richardson (http://www.weblogg-ed.com) (used with permission). Most of the well-written, profound stuff is from Will Richardson, I simply added in some nitty-gritty instructions on setting up Bloglines and made a few tweaks to "localize" this for Colorado. I've tried to indicate anywhere there is an 'I' whether it's me or Will.

Setting Up an RSS Feed Reader

There are lots of choices (both free and commercial) of software to use as your RSS Aggregator. I’m (Karl) going to suggest using Bloglines, because it’s free, easy and web-based – meaning you can access it from multiple computers without having to worry about installing software or keeping track of which articles you have read.

Set Up an RSS Feed Reader (Aggregator)
1. Use Bloglines: http://www.bloglines.com/register
2. Enter in your e-mail address, password, retype password, choose a time zone, choose a language, click Register.
3. A validation email will be sent to the email address you entered. Once you reply to that, your account is created.
Login to Bloglines
1. http://www.bloglines.com/login
2. Once you are logged in on a particular machine, you will generally stay logged in (unless you click the log out link). Occasionally it will lose track and you’ll have to login again, but usually once you’ve logged in on a particular machine, you can simply go directly to your feeds: http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs
Adding Feeds
1. Click the Add button at the top of your subscription list.
2. Type or paste in the URL for the feed you want to subscribe to. Note that they have special lines for Blogspot (Blogger), LiveJournal and Xanga where you can simply enter the name of the blog and it will usually find the feed address for you. Otherwise, you need to paste in the feed URL on the top line (it can often find the feed from the regular URL as well, but if you know the feed URL, use it).
3. Sometimes there is more than one “feed” for a particular URL, you may have to check a box in front of one of the Available Feeds – it usually doesn’t matter which one.
4. Click Subscribe.
5. Choose what folder you want to put it in (if you’ve created folders), how to handle updated items, display preferences (I - Karl - usually choose Complete Entries), and the other choices if you want. Then click Subscribe.
Adding a Bloglines Subscribe Button to your Browser Toolbar
To make it even easier to subscribe to a feed, you can add a Bloglines Button to your browser toolbar. These directions are for Internet Explorer on Windows, but you can do similar things with other browsers and platforms.
1. Make sure the "Bookmarks Toolbar" is active. (View > Toolbars > Links).
2. Then make sure your Links toolbar is where you can see it. (Right-click anywhere on the toolbar and deselect Lock the Toolbars. Then drag the Links toolbar down and to the left until it is underneath the Address bar, then let go. Then right-click and Lock the Toolbars again).
3. Go to http://www.bloglines.com/help/easysub and follow the directions for your browser.
4. For IE for Windows, right-click on the Sub for Bloglines button and choose Add to Favorites.
5. Click Yes to the warning message.
6. Put the favorite in the links folder (you can rename the default of Sub with Bloglines if you’d like).
7. Click OK. It should now appear on your links toolbar. Now anytime you run across an RSS site that you want to subscribe to, simply click the Sub with Bloglines bookmarklet on your Links toolbar and it will automatically take you to the Bloglines subscribe page and fill in the URL for you.
Bloglines Notifier
You can even download a Bloglines Notifier from http://www.bloglines.com/about/notifier - that will pop up a message at the bottom of your screen every time new content has been posted to any of your feeds.
Logging out of Bloglines
You don’t really have to logout of bloglines unless the machine you are using is not secure and you’re concerned that someone might mess with your feeds. But, if you want to, simply click on the Log Out link in the upper right corner of the bloglines window.

Finding Feeds

Once you have your aggregator set up, it’s time to find some relevant feeds to stock it with. Luckily, more and more news outlets and standard Websites are adding feeds for their content so there will be more and more to choose from in the future. The best newspaper list I’ve (Will Richardson) found so far is at The Media Drop (http://www.themediadrop.com/archives/001588.php#more ) There are links to RSS feeds for at least 125 national, local and university papers there. And dozens of print magazines now have feeds from their online sites. But for now let’s just deal with blogs. First, understand that most Weblogs have a link to their feeds on their homepages. On many, it’s a text link in one of the side columns that says “Syndicate this site (XML).” Or it might be a link that says “RSS 1.0 (or 2.0).” But most often, it’s a pretty orange icon that looks like this: No matter which type it is, you’ll need to click on it in order to get the address of that site’s feed. Don’t worry if the page that comes up is a scary looking mass of code that you can’t make heads or tails of. All you really need is the Internet address of that page (the URL.) Just copy the address, go into Bloglines, click the “Add” link and paste it into the subscribe line at top of the right hand window, and subscribe. Next time you visit your “My Blogs” page, the feed for that site should show up. Alternatively, if you’ve installed the Bloglines Subscribe button on your toolbar, simply click that.

If you’re not sure what Weblogs to subscribe to, you can always use one of the blog search engines to find sites that might be relevant to your interests. Some of the better Weblog search sites include Technorati, Feedster, Daypop, and Google Blog Search but there are many more listed at Weblogs Compendium at this page: http://www.lights.com/weblogs/searching.html . And once you find a few, Bloglines will also recommend some other feeds that you might be interested in based on what you’re already reading. (Isn’t that nice of them?) Just click on “Recommendations” at the bottom of your subscription list.

Finally, you can simple go to your favorite search engine and type in the website you are interested in followed by RSS. For example, type in Rocky Mountain News RSS in Google and the first hit will be the page that lists all the RSS feeds for the Rocky Mountain News.