Current mood:

impressed

bloglines: everything looks so... different
woke up this morning, loaded up bloglines, and found a whole new world.

to celebrate their one year birthday, they gave presents to their users. such good folks.

some of the new toys are pretty nifty. i don't think i'll be using it, but the "My Blog" feature is nice. it allows you to create your own blog within bloglines, so you have your news aggregation and your blog all in one place. you can automatically blog a post from one of your feeds by clicking on the new "Clip/Blog This" link at the bottom of each post, where a new window containing a form will contain the URL with the link tag in it to the post. once your done adding your text, you can either post it to your blog, or add it to the "Clippings", which used to be called the Saved folder, i think. nice, combined feature.

the blog itsef is simple and streamlined, in the signature shaded of blue with white of the bloglines site. anything you've marked public your bloglines blogroll appears on the right, with posts on the left. anything you post from your subscribed feeds shows up with a link to the source blog, so that readers can see that feed in its entirety, and subscribe to that feed. readers can also subscribe to your bloglines blog feed, and you can see who is subscribed to your bloglines blog feed, through links on the upper right. in the "My Blog" admin area on the left, links allow you to create new posts, view a running list of past posts, or change your blog options.

the profile feature, in my mind, is a bummer here. for one thing, i can't seem to turn it off. and while the options theoretically give you the opportunity to turn off features like showing your full name and email address, i can't seem to turn off the email address feature, hard as i try. actually, i don't want the profile to show at all, but i can't turn it off. so for now my blog is private, which gives me an opportunity to play with it more without anyone seeing it. i also don't see a way to edit posts. i clicked on the link to a past post on the left, and nothing happened. hopefully this'll be a future feature.

enough about the blog, how about the aggregator changes!

i kinda miss having the subscribe to a feed form in the left nav. now there's a new link to "Add" a feed at the top of the page. i s'pose if your roll was really long before, it would be not so fun to scroll all the way to the bottom to subscribe, so i can see that as a nifty change. the "Edit" link allows you to move your subscriptions around in the folders, as before, but now it has a more organized feel to it, though not much has changed but the design. it just seems nicer. i think they divied up the "Edit" and "Sort" into the two links, instead of having them all together. i can't really remember, since it's been so long since i added a new feed. and with the fabulous and recently-added ability to organize a feed into a folder when you add it (which happened before the redesign), i haven't really had to play with either feature in a while.

the "Directory" feature seems like a good idea. however, i can't really tell what it's a directory *of*. i looked up some of my feeds, but they don't seem to be in there, so i don't know if it's all bloglines blogs or what. some of the blogs seem to be double-listed, and i'm not sure if that's a function of the turnover in design and functionality. but it's a good idea. the next step would be something like blogdigger, with categories and such, or at least a category search, as an in-between feature.

the search at the top of the page is a nifty, nifty thing. not only can you search all blogs, the web, or your blogs, but you can subscribe to a URL from there. my subscription gripe is solved! huzzah! the web search plugs in to google, which is interesting. i don't like that the results for the web search appear in the content frame of the bloglines interface, and i'm not sure why it bothers me. for the other searches, it makes sense that the results would appear there, but somehow i think the web search should default to a new window. it's silly, but it bothers my brain.

all this feature talk made me realize i hadn't even thought to look at the home page. looky there, neat new stuff there, too. it's clear that bloglines is marketing itself as an all-in-one, feature-rich service. a one-stop shopping for the blogosphere, if you will. staff picks for blog feeds, an easy interface that helps you understand what your options are and how to get started, a clear layout that shows you bloglines is no one-trick pony. i am impressed.