Library Web Chic

Bloglines has a nifty new feature that helps you keep track of what items from feeds you have saved to read later and which ones really are “new” to your aggregator. Basically, what it looks like is this.

Library Web Chic (3/1)

The title of the blog comes first as usual. However, it is followed by two numbers the first number is the “new” items and the second number is the ones that you have saved. This is great for me. Because typically I skim my aggregator during the week and then revisit things later. So in the past I had a difficult time telling if I actually had new stuff to read or not. The new feature lets me keep better track. Although my “to read” stuff seems to be piling up again and I’m going to have to draw a line in the sand and dump what I haven’t read soon.

Bloglines also appears to have added hotkeys which allow a user to more easily navigate through their blogs using the keyboard only. This is a nice feature for accessibility reasons. Allowing users to easily jump to different portions of the screen using hotkeys is essential if you have a text intensive site. Tabbing through 100+ links just isn’t cool. Having hotkeys lets you navigate more easily. I like this addition to Bloglines because the hotkey that allows me to move from one feed to the next is “s”. This allows me to use my left hand to move from one feed to another while I keep my right hand on the mouse for scrolling. Much more efficient for scanning the numerous feeds I read!