Pen-Elayne on the Web

News Aggregators Explained

Like Laura and Andante, I've also fallen in love with a news aggregator called Bloglines. I wrote yesterday about the confusion that is RSS. I think I have it figured out now. A news aggregator is like a Usenet newsreader, only instead of message threads it reads blogs and lets you know which ones have new entries. I didn't realize this until I started playing around with Bloglines; had someone taken me aside, slapped me upside the head and said "Dummkopf, it's like reading Usenet only with blogs instead," I'd have nodded sagely that much earlier. :) Anyway, you need to be set up with an RSS feed in order for Bloglines to work on your blog, which Laura explained is pretty easy for those of us on Blogger - "if you are using blogspot to blog, setting up a site feed is really pretty simple. Go to your blog settings, click on the Site Feed tab, and set it to Yes." One more feature I never knew existed until I needed it! So for the moment I've only gotten through subscribing to about a third of my blogroll, and am putting an asterisk next to everyone who doesn't yet have an RSS feed, to remind myself that I need to check 'em off my sidebar instead of the newsreader...