With the influx of genealogy blogs out there, I thought I’d share my philosophy about “reading” them.

Some people only subscribe to a handful of blogs, likely because managing them can be a pain.  They have their favorites and they follow faithfully.  I on the other hand, subscribe to several genealogy blogs.  Why?  Well, I’ve already connected with two distant cousins through our blogs, and I’m sure there are more out there.  Besides, I love reading people’s stories, research conundrums, tips, and genealogy news.  But following nearly 300 blogs, 95% of which are genealogy blogs, can be quite cumbersome, unless you have the right reader.

When I started reading blogs about seven months ago, I used the reader in Internet Explorer.  Just before the holidays, IE8 crashed and I was unable to read my feeds.  I started to look for other alternatives.  Initially, I started using Google Reader.  Since I use Blogger and had a list of blogs I was following, I was off to a good start since those feeds were already in the reader.  But I didn’t care for the interface, so I continued my search for a new reader.

Some how or another, I came across Bloglines, which is part of Ask.com.  I liked the interface and the features so I began to add all of my feeds, over 300 of them.

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Like IE and Google Reader, I was able to create folders to separate my feeds by topic (e.g. Genealogy, Business, Writing, etc.).

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And, like Google Reader, I can “clip/star” individual posts.  The nice thing about Blogline’s clipping feature is that you can create folders to store them in (e.g. Read Later, For Research, etc.).

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You can also view your feeds on a web-enabled phone (this was really handy on the long drive to and from Arizona!), which I assume you can also do with Google Reader.  There are also ways to share your feeds with others.

There is a widget for your blog or website, however, with almost 300 feeds, it’s ridiculous to post it on my blog.  But, I am able to share my Blogline profile showing my Blogroll via a simple link:  http://www.bloglines.com/public/juliemc77.

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There are all kinds of settings you can fiddle with to suit your own needs.

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With all the wonderful genealogy blogs out there, I wanted to make sure I found the best reader that suited my needs.  Bloglines is definitely the one for me.