With the bloom of blogging, I have many friends who start to blog. As there are many links to click each time to view their sites, the work load becomes a hectic, especially when some sites take very long to load or have popup advertisement banners. Moreover, not everyone updates their blog site daily, thus my effort is wasted often.

With the invention of RSS, I am therefore able to know who have updated their blog sites and only then I need to go in so as to find out more about their recent lives; sometimes, I do not even need to go in when I am able to view the whole entry.

To be able to accomplish this, I entrust the use of Bloglines.com to retrieve and gather all the updated links. Thus, I would log in everyday or even hour, and refresh it for new updates from all my friends. Other than Bloglines.com, there are other sites which provide the same service, including the Mozilla Firefox browser, which I have not tried.

There are of course some cons. Firstly, the RSS might not be updated immediately, perhaps, Bloglines.com might be overloaded at that time; it is a free service after all. Secondly, some photos might not be viewed as the blogger’ webhost like for example Blogspot.com has file restriction that the photos can only be loaded from its sites most of the time. Lastly, I am not able to view the latest updates of the tagboards.

The reason for me to stick on with Bloglines.com is that it is the first free service provider I have tried and I do not like to change environment. I could have used the Firefox browser but since it is installed in the computer itself, I will not be able to retrieve the updates when I am not using my own computer; I prefer an online service instead.

However, I am not able to do this for every site because not every of them provide RSS (example Diaryland.com). Whereas, for Blogspot.com users, they have a choice whether to enable or disable the site feed. For most users, the default is set enabled; nonetheless a few of them have it disabled.

Eventually, I have been bugging some of my friends who use Blogspot.com to enable their site feed.

There are just a few simple steps.

1. log into Blogspot
2. go to “Settings>Publishing” and choose “Yes” for the “Notify Weblogs.com and click “save settings”
3. go to “Settings>Publish Site Feed” and choose “Yes” for the “Publish Site Feed” and click “save settings”
4. click the “Republish” button on the “You must Republish your blog to see the changes” prompt