If you’re an avid blog follower, you likely subscribe to your favorite sites so you can keep up with their content. Some people get new posts in their email, while others prefer to use some sort of reader, a place where ALL of their subscriptions can be found in one place and filed into various categories. You can usually read directly from the reader, without even visiting the site unless you want to leave a comment or give the blogger the satisfaction of a pageview.
Until lately, THE reader has been Google Reader, because Google pretty much runs the world, and your blog reading along with it. But the Google gods announced earlier this year that as of July 1 2013, they would be sending their reader to sleep with the fishes, along with its friends Google Buzz, Google Wave, and Google+. Oh wait. We’re still trying to use that last one, aren’t we?*
That means that if you’re using Reader, you need to find a new method to corral your favorite content from around the web. Here are a few suggestions:
Feedly
I just started using Feedly, and I love it like Claire loves her preschool boyfriend. Feedly allows you to import ALL of your current subs directly from Google Reader, so really you don’t have to do much of anything. I took it a step further and used it as an opportunity to clean up and unsubscribe from a bunch of subs that weren’t relevant to me anymore (not yours, of course).
Feedly shows images from the posts in your reading list, which is a nice improvement from the somewhat utilitarian looking Google Reader. I also love that they have an iPhone app, which Google Reader didn’t (although they did have one for Droid). Best of all, you can share a post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or email straight from Feedly. Really it’s the best lazy person’s reader.
Note: I had tried to unsubscribe from certain blogs over and over again in Google Reader, but they kept coming back like a bad case of herpes. I used to be in Blogger back in the day, and turns out I had to go in and manually unfollow all of the blogs that I had originally subscribed to through the Blogger dashboard FROM the Blogger dashboard. It wasn’t all that quick, but it didn’t take a whole afternoon, and my nice, clean herpes-free Feedly reader makes me uber happy.
bloglovin’
I don’t know a lot about bloglovin,’ but I do know some who use it and like it. You can follow your favorite blogs and apparently discover new ones. Hooray! I haven’t signed up, so I really have no experience, but you should know that it’s out there. They also have iPhone and Android apps.
If email reading is your thang, feel free to sign up to receive all of your favorite blogs in your inbox. Most of them should have an email subscription option in the sidebar (mine is right over there…just under my social media icons, or enter your email addy below). I check my email so sporadically throughout the day, that any and all blogs would get lost until I had a chance to sit down and devote time to reading them, and that ain’t happening. But a lot of people prefer it.
Not only do I deliver my posts via my Facebook page, I talk all kinds of nonsense over there too. It’s fun. But while I definitely think you should like my page, I don’t recommend making it your prime source for keeping up with your favorite blogs, since Zuckerberg likes to play around with algorithms more than his…you know. Basically out of all of a page’s fans, only a certain percentage of people will actually see each post due to both timing and fancy Facebook math.
Genie in a Blog
Promote Your Page Too
Some days I log onto Twitter and it’s nothing but #giveaways and #reviews and #noise. And the inspirational quotes….BLECH. But other days I log on and it’s tweet after tweet of great content from awesome bloggers and all of the sudden I have 30 tabs open on my computer.
How do you keep up with your favorite stuff from around the web?
*For a really interesting article on Google’s failed products, check out this post on the Failed Google Graveyard. Pretty interesting to see what they tried to get off the ground.
