I tried Bloglines earlier this year but I didn't fall for it. I also tried several other online and offline systems but I always went back to SharpReader.
I decided to give Bloglines another chance on my Christmas vacation as I did not bring my PC (it's a vacation after all:-) Bloglines imported my OPML file from SharpReader without problems and organized my blogs like I was used to in a tree view.
As my blogroll has grown I appreciate Bloglines a lot more. It has several great features:
- It is good for reading blogs that has a lot of noise any only have a new items you care about. The alternate background of the blog items works very well so it's fast to skip to the next item.
- I can easily catch up with an entire group of feeds by selecting the parent folder in the treeview. Great for groups of feeds with few posts.
- The "clip/blog" feature is great for keeping track of items I want to blog about or read later. I clipped some items before I left that I'll have a look at during my vacation
- By default it links open in new windows
- It keeps RSS traffic down to bandwidth challenged people like myself. Bloglines checks the feeds once an hour for all users whereas normal RSS clients check each feed individually. Click the 'sub bloglines' icon above to subscribe to this feed with Bloglines.
- It is free
The only drawback is that it only works online. It is not a big problem as most blog entries point to something that I have to be online to read anyway.
Looks like a winter storm is heading my way so I'll have some time to catch up with my feeds (unless the power goes out again).