Using Bloglines as an RSS Feed Reader
Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com) is one of several web-based feed readers that will allow you to collect subscriptions to headlines and summaries of news sources, tables of contents of journals, blogs, and subject searches of the blogosphere. Here’s how to:
(1) Set up an account in Bloglines:
Go to Bloglines: http://www.bloglines.com Click on “Subscribe.” Click on “Creating an account.” Fill out the information requested and click on “Register.” Thereafter, just use the login screen and fill in your email address and password.
(2) Find and subscribe to a blog:
To find blogs of interest, you can do a search in the upper right hand corner of the main Bloglines pages. From the drop-down menu, have the system find your subject in “Search for Feeds.” When you find one of interest, click on the “subscribe to feed” associated with that blog. Fill out Bloglines form. If you don’t want others to know you’ve subscribed to that feed, check “private.” If you subscribe to several feeds, you may want to organize them in folders, and then as you add feeds, each time tell Bloglines on the subscribe form which folder to use. Example: change drop-down menu to “search for feeds” and search for “feminism.” Select one of the resultant blogs. (Also notice the related blogs listed in the “blogroll” associated with that blog. You may find others of interest that way.) Click on “subscribe to feed” and fill out the Bloglines form.
(3) Subscribe to a search:
Once you’ve run a subject search, you can have Bloglines keep running that search for you, and have it appear within your Bloglines account. Example: Run the “search for posts” on “gender mainstreaming.” Under “Subscribe to this Search,” click on Bloglines, and fill out the form.
(4) Set up a feed from a journal as a table of contents alert service:
You will need to find the orange RSS button, either on the journal’s homepage, or within a database such as Project Muse. Example: go to publisher’s homepage for Feminist Media Studies (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/14680777.asp). There’s no RSS button directly from that page, but the publisher offers a link to “online contents” (at right). Click on “online contents.”
The resultant page, http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713700978, has the RSS button. Click on the RSS button. Copy the URL of the RSS page, and paste it in Bloglines on the Subscribe page (http://www.bloglines.com/sub).
(5) Set up a feed from a news source:
Newspapers and other news sources often have several broad subject area feed options (ex.: world news, science, etc.) from which to select those of interest. You will receive headlines and brief summaries. Example: Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Go to site http://www.jsonline.com/ . Scroll all the way down to the bottom and click on the orange “RSS” button. Find a feed of interest, such as “Education News and Features” and click on the XML buttom for that feed. Copy the URL for that feed (in this example, the URL is http://www.jsonline.com/rss/headlines/news-education.xml) and paste it in the Bloglines Subscribe page (http://www.bloglines.com/sub) Fill out Bloglines form and click “Subscribe.”
phw 4/30/2007 http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies/Bloglines_RSSFeedReader.doc