Chris Clarke just mentioned that his weblog, Creek Running North, wasn't on my blogroll, to my embarrassment; it should be, it's the kind of stuff I'm into, and it was my mistake that it wasn't. Please do send me e-mail and make recommendations for weblogs I ought to find interesting. I don't promise to add it, but I'll at least take a look.

I rely on those syndication feeds that weblog software should provide. There's a good tutorial on what those are at the American Street—here's parts 1, 2, and 3—but basically they are simple machine readable digests of your recent site content. They allow special newsreader software to quickly check if you've recently updated anything, and slurp in a summary or even a complete copy of your latest articles. What that means for me is that I don't have to click on each link to the 200+ weblogs over there on the right to see if anyone has written something new. I just tell my software to go look for me while I get a cup of coffee, and when I get back, it shows me a list of all the new stuff written since I last looked. I can just double-click on any that look interesting to see them in my web browser.

It really is that easy. I don't know how people read weblogs without a newsreader.

The one I use is Mac only, NetNewsWire, but I'm sure there are plenty of others on the Windows/Linux side of the fence (and maybe some commenters can mention some). It also makes it easy to add new weblogs. When I run across a site I like, first thing I look for is one of those orange "XML" buttons, or a link that says "Syndicate this site", or on blogger sites, you can often just stick "atom.xml" to the end of the url. All I do then is click-and-drag that link to the NetNewsWire window, and poof, it's on my roster of regular reads.

The other thing I use it for is maintaining the blogroll, but that isn't quite as smooth and easy as it could be. I export the list of weblogs from NetNewsWire to what is called an opml file (there's a link to my opml file over there on the right, too, which you could import into a newsreader and be instantly subscribed to all the weblogs I read.) I also cobbled together a little php script that reads my opml file and converts it to the xhtml list you see, so all I have to do is upload it to the Pharyngula web site, and it gets included on the web page.

One other handy feature within NetNewsWire is the "Dinosaurs" window—it keeps track and tells me what weblogs haven't been updated within some window of time. That makes it easy to detect and cull dead links (another reason to write me and ask to be put on the blogroll is if you've been on hiatus and I've ruthlessly expunged you.)

The bottom line is that it actually is trivial for me to add someone to the blogroll, and checking sites is very efficient. I honestly do scan every weblog on my blogroll once a day with the newsreader, and I'd guess I read at least one article a week on each one rather more carefully…more for some sites than others, of course. Join the party!