I use bloglines to aggregate/monitor the plethora of blogs I read.

Firefox provides a cute little icon down at the bottom corner of my Firefox window which sports a red polka dot whenever one of the blogs I track is updated. Means I don't have to go clickety clickety through my list of blogs once a day or twice a week to find out who has and who hasn't posted something new. (Hi, Zen!)

When the red polka dot pops up, I click on the icon and Firefox brings up a window displaying my bloglines feeds list, with the feeds that have new entries clearly marked and the entries themselves shown in preview format. Click on the name of the blog, if any of the entries look interesting, and pull up the blog itself. Easy peasy.

Every once in a bit a feed that bloglines tracks goes sneakers up and I don't get notified of new posts on someone's blog.

Happened last week with Asha at Language Barrier.

Happened this week with Father Luke.

I don't know the feed's busted until I realize I haven't seen something new for a while from someone who usually posts fairly regularly. When that happens, I check their blog and find new posts that bloglines hasn't noticed.

Dropped Asha a note. She said she'd check into it when she wasn't connecting in from 'net cafes in Mexico. After I dropped Padre a note, he sent me his new RSS feed details. I popped that info into bloglines and Bob's your uncle.

bloglines claims Asha's feed is up-to-date, but when you preview the feed, the latest post showing is dated July some time. I'll wait patiently and click her blog link until she gets the feed cleared up.

Preetam Rai has a very lucid description of how Bloglines works and how to use it.

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:33 PM|| |