Bloglover | Tips for keeping up with your reading

There are over 337 participants in Kendi's 30 for 30 challenge and I've subscribed to just about every one of them in my Google Reader (the bundle RSS feed really helped). This is on top of my hundreds of blog posts that I read each day, including non-challenge fashion blogs, local blogs, food blogs, design blogs, and social media/publishing/industry blogs. I thought today I would share with you all a little about how I keep up and some tools I use to keep track of everything I'm reading and commenting on.


Google Reader
Many of you may be familiar with this handy dandy tool. Here is what my Google Reader looks like tonight:

Some Google Reader features I live by:

• Categories.  As you can see, I have quite a few categories. Some blogs are in more than one category. This make it easy for me to prioritize what to read first.  If I want to find a specific blog, I can just click on the plus sign to the left of a category for a list of all the blogs within.
• Stars/keep as read.  I star items that I want to keep or consider for my weekly links.  While I will often catch up on blog reading on my lunch break, I don't want to abuse my work computer so I try to save posts I want to comment on for later.  That's where the "keep as read" button comes in handy (not shown in photo above).
• Expanded and list settings (seen above in the blue bar, right aligned). There are some categories that I skim, like social media, where blog posts can often get repetitive, or sports, where I just want to get the headlines.  I can glance through those quickly in list mode (shown) and then mark all as read when I've read all I wanted to read.  The blogs I want to read, like fashion, remixers, or local blogs, I put on expand, which shows all the content that comes through the feed.  Some blogs do limit how much comes through on the RSS feed, presumably to entice people to actually click through to their site (confession: I usually don't).
• Subscribe via address bar (see graphic below).  Did you know that when you're on a site with an RSS feed, a little shortcut appears that lets you add the feed to Reader without having to find the RSS URL and cutting and pasting?
• Google Friend Connect/Following. When you subscribe to an RSS feed in Google, it doesn't show that you follow the blog on their Google Friend Connect (see the widget in my right column with all the thumbnails? That's the Google Friend Connect.) But if you're already following a blog through Google Friend Connect (or want to do that instead--I love letting other bloggers know that I'm a follower that way), it brings those subscriptions right to your Reader.  It's the last category titled "Blogs I'm Following."  Sometimes it takes a few refreshes for a new blog to show.

Another great reader that works with your Google subscriptions is feedly, a Firefox plugin (although it may also be available for other browsers) which also include social media sharing tools in its reading pane. You can choose from neat magazine like layouts there instead of just the lists like Google Reader.  They went through some design and functionality changes a while ago and I couldn't really keep up, so I went back to Google Reader and have stayed there.

You can also subscribe to blogs through other web services like Bloglovin', Networked Blogs, and Blog Catalog, although their selection may be slightly more limited than everything that has an RSS feed (but you can find the New Professional on all three).

coComment
This has got to be one of the niftiest tools, and for me it was like a dream come true (well, almost.  wish, more like it).  It is also a browser plugin (for IE and Firefox) that keeps track of your comments on most blog posts and platforms!  Check it out:

How cool is that?!?  It even has a little icon in your browser that changes when you have new unread comments.

so meta--you can see this post in progress

It doesn't work with Disqus-powered comment systems (which generally sends you responses to your comment via email anyway), and a few others, but it works well for all the Blogger and Wordpress-powered blogs I read. It's always nice to know if and how people respond.  And then if I see something I want to say in follow-up, it's easy to click right through back to the post and reply again!  You can also choose to stop tracking conversations if a post is getting too many comments or if you were just waiting for a reply and already got one.  There are some other features to coComment, but I haven't really explored it much past comment tracking.  The tracking is web-based and you have to have a log-in, but if you forget to log in and have already commented on a few blog posts, when you do log in (in the same web browsing session), it can usually detect any comments you've made and asks if you want to import them into your conversations.

Okay, so really I only had two tools to share, but these really help me stay organized and on top of my blog reading.

What tools have you found to help organize your online reading?