Bloglines (The best way to read the news)

Everyone has a morning routine. Or a evening routine. Or a newspaper routine. There are certain ways that we all start to do things. It doesn’t happen on purpose, or even consiously, but everyone does it. If you ever want proof of this start thinking about how you are brushing your teeth (you do brush your teeth don’t you). Once you start thinking about the process required to get your chompers looking their best, you start screwing it up! Weird huh?

What does this have to do with Bloglines? Well Bloglines is a big part of my morning routine. It is a RSS aggregator that lets you add any number of syndicated sites to your subscription list. Every morning you can have all of the most interesting stories that you care about displayed in one place. Combine this web page with Firefox and you have a great morning routine. Here’s how I use the two together:

• Open up myblogs and click on the top folder in the left pane. This displays all of the unread items from my subscriptions
• When I find a story that I find interesting I do a middle click on the link which opens it up in a tab (I love tabbed browsing!). I then continue scrolling down the list of stories, middle clicking on any that might interest me.
• As soon as I’ve finished scanning all the latest stories I can start going through the tabs that I’ve opened. Depending on the story, this could spawn even more tabs. Then after a great information feast, I’m ready for the day

Another essential start is my personal comic page that is generated daily using dailystrips. It compiles a bunch of my favorite comics and puts them all on one page for reading enjoyment.

How do you start your day?

ps. By the way 4 thumbs up for Bloglines. It’s easy to use and it’s really convenient to check your new stories from anywhere you have Web access.