Tried to set my friend Marci Alboher up with Bloglines over the weekend. What a nightmare. She’d heard of RSS and had tried one other RSS reader before. That didn’t make this any less confusing. Sometimes RSS is called Atom. Sometimes Bloglines autodiscovers, but sometimes you need to add the url manually. And lots of times there’s more than one option. When you think you’ve got it going, Bloglines doesn’t pick up the feed. A total mess.

So I followed up with this tutorial (I’d love to hear any other tips for getting people started with Really Simple Syndication):

The basic premise is simple, most blogs have a computer-friendly version that’s been specially formatted so that other computers can read it. Bloglines sucks the computer-friendly versions of blogs into your account so that you can read your favorite blogs in one place. Your job as a blog reader and Bloglines user is to tell Bloglines where this computer-friendly version is. People call this subscribing to a blog.

Unfortunately, geeks like me have completely muddled this idea by calling the computer-friendly version of the blog 100 different names. The most common are RSS, Atom, Syndication, Feed, and XML. If you stick to those five names, you should be able to spot the computer-friendly version.

Often you’ll find more than one of these names on a blog. For legacy reasons, there’s many different formats of the computer-friendly version. You can safely ignore these and pick the first one listed.

There’s also a bit of confusion when it comes to subscribing to a blog. Here are you best four options.

1. You had the most success when you were able to find a button on the page that said “Subscribe with Bloglines.” Keep using this if people provide it. [This surprised me, I'd never noticed these buttons before. Marci did, and kept using them.]

2. When you’re reading a blog click the “Subscribe with Bloglines” button on the bookmark toolbar on your browser (it’s the left-most link on the third toolbar, i.e. look at the top left of your browser) [I had previously added the bookmarklet to her toolbar].

There’s one very nice thing about this approach – Bloglines will search the blog for you and automatically pick out computer-friendly versions that it can subscribe to.

There’s two not so nice things. Often there will be a several options – pick the first one. There’s only a 50% chance of this working correctly – click preview before finishing the subscription to see if it worked.

This is how I normally subscribe to blogs.

3. Find the url of the computer-friendly version and add it manually to Bloglines. To find the url first find and click a button or link that says RSS, Atom, XML, Syndication, or something similar. If you see a really ugly page that’s full of text and angle brackets you’re in the right place. Copy the url from your address bar, this is the location of the computer-friendly version.

Now go to Bloglines. Click on the MyFeeds tab located in the upper-left of the screen. Click the “add” link underneath the tabs. Enter the url from above in the text box that’s labeled “Blog Feed or URL.”

4. Give up and bookmark it. Some blogs don’t offer any sort of computer-friendly version. In this case all you can do is keep coming
back to the site.