Thanks to Brendan, I am now a Bloglines aficionado!

It’s much faster than RSS Bandit or SharpReader because it doesn’t have to poll every feed. True sometimes the feeds aren’t updated to the minute, but if that’s your problem, please direct your OCD elsewhere.

The usability is great. I have this habit of deleting a post when I’ve read it. It’s sort of my “todo” list. I do the same thing with emails (or I file them in a folder). When Bloglines marked all the feeds as read when I clicked on my feed list, I thought “NOOOOO!” But they have something just as good. There is a little collapse link in the feed pane. And, not only is the collapse link at the top of the post, but at the bottom too! So I read a post, then collapse it, and my world is good again. Plus I can check my subscriptions wherever I am and not have to reread or re-delete posts that I’ve already looked at.

I can also display the new posts since the last session (the default), or in the last 1, 6, 12, 24, 48, or 72 hours, 1 week, 1 month, or ALL items! Gosh the choices are just so exciting. Ok, maybe not exciting, but so far it’s been handy a couple of times.

There is also a recommendations feature, sort of like Amazon’s “people reading this book also read…” stuff; very cool. I found 1 new feed this way, and regularly look to see if anything is different.

There are a lot more features that I haven’t even tried yet. It can generate a blogroll for your blog, it offers a download notifier, it allows you to save blog “clippings”, and perform blog searches. Check out this subscribe button: