So especially now that all my siblings, and even some of their significant others, have blogs (including Britt, Gina, Shane, and Ben), it's going to be a pain to check and see when everyone has updated their blog. I found a great tool today for making this easier.

First of all, if you're using Blogger and you haven't turned on the site feed, do so now. It allows readers to use a tool that will alert them when there are new posts. When you see a little graphic somewhere that looks like , this is usually a link to a site feed in either RSS (really simple syndication) or Atom format. To turn it on, check the Blogger help entry titled How do I change my site feed settings?.

You'll notice the little XML image on the sidebar of this site, but underneath it is something new - a link to Bloglines, that looks like this:



Bloglines helps you to create a list of all the blogs you read, and will display which ones have new posts, just like an e-mail program does. So if you create a Bloglines account and subscribe to this site, you can see when there are new posts using Bloglines. But you can also see, at a glance, when any of the Mooneys have posted something new. Cool, huh? Programs that do this are called "RSS reader aggregators". They basically aggregate other content on the web for you.

I've seen other programs that do this, but this is the best one I've seen yet. It's free, and it's online, so you can access it from anywhere. You can add subscriptions to any site that includes a site feed, including two of my favorites -- Neal Boortz' Nealz Nuze and James Taranto's Best of the Web Today. On those, or any other sites that regularly publish content, just look for the little XML graphic. You can even get comics (Bloglines has links to Dilbert and Get Fuzzy), weather, and news via RSS.

The best part is that if you're hosting your blog on blogspot, you don't even have to turn on the site feed for it to work with your site. So it works with my siblings' blogs even though they haven't turned on the site feed yet.

Labels: tech