File this one under “cool” folks. Bloglines is a free web-based news aggregator that allows you to track all your favorite blogs in one place. Any blog that generates an RSS feed can be monitored by Bloglines. In short by registering for a free account with Bloglines.com, you can enter the URLs of all your favorite blogs, and then simply check your Bloglines page when you want to catch up on them. Bloglines will let know know immediately which ones have new articles…
With Bloglines you can organize your favorite blogs into folders as shown in the image at right. You can even peruse articles from multiple blogs in one window, or hop over to each blog and read the articles there.
The Notifier
Perhaps the coolest capability of Bloglines is the notifier. The notifier is a small executable you can download and install on your computer. It puts a small icon on your screen which changes appearance and (at your option) plays a sound when one of the blogs you are following is updated. Since I use windows, the icon appears in my system tray and looks like this: 
. When a blog I am interested in is updated the icon changes to look like this: 
. Clicking the icon takes me directly to my Bloglines page where I can then see what's up. Now when I sit down at my computer I can tell immediately if there's anything new on the blogs that interest me without even having to open a browser window. How cool is that? 
Blogrolling with Bloglines
Furthermore you can make your subscriptions sharable, and use Bloglines to manage and generate your blogroll if you are a blogger. Just a snippet of javascript gets the job done.
| Here's my blogroll… | Here's the script that generated it |
<SCRIPT |
Note that since you can specify the folder in the script you can make multiple different kinds of blogrolls… political, science, humor, whatever and Bloglines will do all the heavy lifting for you. The appearance of the Bloglines blogroll can be customized via CSS to help make it match your blog better.
Bloglines definitely gets a thumbs-up from me. Give it a try!
I had bloglines bookmarked for some reason but did not realize what it was. Thanks for the little push I needed to sign up. Since I have had Radio Userlands aggregator for the last three years, I was not sufficiently motivated to try another aggregator but I find this one makes adding URLs as simple as a click. Your site actually looks and reads better with bloglines. Your site seemed to take a long time to load today but I will probably not have to worry about wait time now that I access you via Bloglines.
Hi Abacquer — Just wanted to let you know that I have written an improved Bloglines Notifier that reports the number of new items directly on the system-tray icon: http://jonaquino.blogspot.com/2005/03/better-bloglines-notifier.html