How do you read blogs?

Blogs serve a number of functions: highly-specialized media sources, public notebooks, a nexus for organzing a group of people and an inexpensive alternative to an ordinary web site, to name a few.

If I see a blog — or for those for whom blog is a bad thing, a Web site with regularly updated, short-format articles — I want to keep reading it in case something else useful comes along.

That’s how I got to reading more than 350 blogs, recently trimmed to a manageable 300. (Some writers post very infrequently.)

I read them via Google Reader, through I sometimes worry about my over-dependence on Google resources and choose instead a feed reader like Liferea, for Linux desktops. (If a blog doesn’t have a way to pump out the content of your blog — a feed, like RSS — it isn’t much of a blog to me. Fortunately, these days you have to almost go out of your way to not have a feed.) Back before my blog collection topped 30, I would use a Firefox plugin, Sage, which treated the feeds like bookmarks.

Which begs me to ask, how do you manage your favorite blogs? And what secret, out-of-the-way blog do you like.

By Scott Wells

Scott Wells, 46, is a Universalist Christian minister doing Universalist theology and church administration hacks in Washington, D.C.

3 comments

  1. I used to use Bloglines, but I am a big Google Reader fan because of the share feature. In fact, I wish I was connected to more people on Google Reader who shared posts that they particularly liked.

    I read mostly UU, small business marketing, photography and crafting blogs – nothing that I think you would love. Lately though I have been into Rainn Wilson’s new blog http://www.soulpancake.com

  2. I loved Bloglines, but have given it up for Google Reader because the latter is never blocked, it seems.

    I keep two Google accounts: one for general interest, and one specifically for food. While the latter primarily consists of Atlanta food blogs, you might find Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved blog interesting, although knowing you, you might already have found it.

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