Now that my blog is up and running again, after the recent debacle I have described in this other blog post, and that regular blogging, once again, has resumed, I thought it would be a good chance as well to remind folks about an important change that will be happening very soon and which may affect some of you as well: BlogLines will shut down its doors on October 1st. Are you ready for the move? You probably should! Specially, if you are one of the 200+ folks who are subscribed to this blog’s feed. After that date you won’t be able to get updates from it anymore. Time to prepare…
That’s right! According to the statistics coming from Feedburner, it looks like there are a couple of hundred folks out there who are subscribed to https://elsua.net through BlogLines and it may be a good time to prepare the transition into other RSS Feed Readers, if you would want to continue syndicating the content from this blog. My good friend, Jack Vinson, has put together a rather helpful and insightful blog post, where he has shared some of the alternatives that folks may want to consider, whether you would be interested in online or offline feed reading. It’s a good read and I highly recommend it.
You may be wondering what my RSS feed reader recommendation may well be, right? Well, I actually use a combination of several RSS aggregators, since I decided, a long while ago, to load balance the amount of feeds I’m subscribed to, so that it wouldn’t be that overwhelming time and time again. So under Windows (I still have a T400) I am using RSS Owl, which is nicely integrated into my flow with Lotus Notes (You see? *So* much more than just email! hehe).
On my Mac, where I spent most of my days nowadays anyway, I use a variety of them: Opera, Cyndicate and Vienna for my offline feed reading and specially for those RSS feeds behind the firewall. I use Opera and Cyndicate for the immediate daily internal reads and Vienna for the good-to-read-at-some-point, but-not-really-in-a-rush-at-the-moment. Also use Vienna for researching articles published by others that I know I may need to reference at some point in time.
For my external RSS feed reading habits I am currently using NetNewsWire (Offline) and Google Reader (For which I use a couple of user interfaces through iPad apps I have described already on several blog posts). I use the latter as well with two accounts: one with the essential newsfeeds I go through every day, and another one with the general feeds I have been following over the course of the years. Both accounts serve the purpose as well of having an online backup of the feeds, which allows me then to bring them with me wherever I may well go, which is when the iPad becomes indispensable as a powerful content aggregator. Not to mention as well how often I search for relevant content within either account, which I then include as part of my blog posts over here.
So, as you can see, perhaps a little bit too complex, but it works for me. It’s the feed reading habit that I have learned to grow and treasure over the last 8 years, when I subscribed to my first blog and the rest is history. It’s a system that works for me, and don’t expect anyone else to take it up for themselves. However, one thing I have learned throughout the years is to let go with that obsession of wanting to read each and everyone of them all and reach “inbox zero” on my feed readers day in day out. Well, that’s no longer happening. Somehow, by immersing rather heavily inside my social networks I have learned to trust them over time quite a bit and a good chunk of my feed reading habits is already pre-filtered by them. They keep finding the really good stuff I am interested in, and, most importantly, they keep sharing it across! Probably just as much as I do with them (I would hope). So instead of focusing on striking another “inbox zero”, I just focus on the content that matters to me and the rest I just let it go. Yes, once again, that river of news and the continuous flow of the Social Web…
Ok, hope you may find all of that information useful and helpful, but enough with that diversion, don’t you think? hehe … Like I was saying at the beginning, BlogLines is about to shut down in the next few days and you may need to start looking for another strategy to get your RSS feeds elsewhere, if you are still using it. The one for this blog is over here, so if you would want to move it across to your new RSS feed reader that would be the URL address you would need to use…
Hope to see you on the other side, after BlogLines is there no more!, to keep up with the conversations… Oh, and a good bunch of folks out there are also subscribed to the blog via email with the wonderful service of FeedBlitz. That is, indeed, another option; remember email going back to its roots? A messaging and notification system of sorts? Exactly! So here you have got the URL address you can use to subscribe to the blog through email.
Thanks again for sticking around and hope the transition on October 1st, or sooner!, goes smooth for those of you who are still using BlogLines. Good luck!
Technorati Tags: BlogLines, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, iPad, KM, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, Mac, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Productivity, Productivity Tools, RSS, RSS Feed Readers, RSS Feeds, Social Capital, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Software, Feedburner, Jack Vinson, RSS Owl, Cyndicate, Vienna, NetNewsWire, Google Reader, GReader, Opera, Sunsets, FeedBlitz, Subscription, Aggregators, Productivity Tips, Syndication
Have you tried feedly yet?