Reading blogs

When i saw my sister this Easter Monday, she asked how to keep up with blogs. Not mine alone, but others as well. A friend of hers just started one and she didn’t know, apart from visiting it each time, how to keep up with the contents. She mostly visits Facebook.

When i’m happy with a post, i do make a Facebook and a Twitter entry. But that’s usually two or three times a week. And i do post 5 times a week.

I’ve been online since 1995, twenty years already. I’ve seen blogs coming into existence and fade out again. The way i use to get the content is an old fashioned one, RSS.

There are other ways to follow a blog. Flipboard, Bloglovin and many more have ways to follow a blog. I do use Flipboard on my iPad, but i’m not sure if you can add a single blog to it. Bloglovin i researched a bit, but it’s just not that appealing to me.

Until 2013 Google Reader was the main source for most people to have their RSS feeds collected. Most apps used Google Reader to get the feeds delivered to them. And then Google dropped it. Because RSS was becoming less popular.

I had to reorganize my trusted systems. I did some research. Most people were using feedly.com, so i decided on that. I imported my feeds from Google Reader.

Let me explain where you can find a feed on a site. On my old site lfs.nl i made a feed myself. As is my custom, i made this in a present, called rss. I had to do a search for rss on the homepage to find it.

On WordPress blogs it is a bit easier to find than that. The main feed you can usually find at the url of the site with /feed added to it. So on ellenpronk.com the url of the feed is ellenpronk.com/feed.

On feedly my list of blogs looks as follows:

Cooking

• 101 Cookbooks
• Chocolate and Zucchini
• David Lebovitz
• Lottie & Doof
• smitten kitchen

Design and Coding

• A list apart
• Ars Technica
• Daring Fireball
• kottke.org
• Subtraction
• Lea Verou
• markboulton.co.uk
• Quirksblog

Make up and Perfumes

• Mascha’s Beautyblog
• Miss Lipgloss
• Painted Ladies
• Beautyscene
• Dr. Jetske Ultee
• Fabulous over Forty
• Lisa Eldridge
• Nathan Branch
• The Non-Blonde

Personal

• Ellen’s blog

Stuff I like

• Minimal Mac
• The Dissolve
• trendbeheer
• Whedonesque
• ftrain.com

Wow

• Blizzard Watch
• Tobold’s MMORPG Blog
• Power word: gold
• Tarou Wow guides

On my iPad 1 i use Newsify to read my blogs. It syncs all the unread posts and gives me a list of around a 100 posts each day. I don’t read all of them, i browse and read the ones i want to.

This is my way to read the blogs i want to read. I actually should go through my feedly list soon, as i see now many blogs don’t update anymore. And there might be other blogs i’m interested in.

For all the people who have less time online, there are many ways to get content to you. You may depend on Facebook, but to me that is a fuzzy way to get content, where many things are out of your control. It’s not my way. Pick a way that fits your life. That can be Facebook, or Twitter, or Flipboard, or any other way. And it might change in a years time!