Dave's Bloglines Account in action:
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detailed image.

Can any website make a person 100-percent more productive in their day-to-day tasks? If that person is a heavy duty weblogger and the site being talked about is Bloglines.com, the answer is yes.

Over the weekend, I redesigned my desk adding a PC with a 1280 x 1024 display as my second computer. That machine is more or less my dedicated weblogging workstation. Since I haven't used a PC on a fulltime basis for over three years, I had to find an RSS reader that was powerful and flexible.

I briefly surveyed the market and decided that I'd try Bloglines first. You can't beat the price, since it's free. Within an hour, I added about 100 different feeds to my account. I organized them according to the Operation Gadget categories, which is a vast improvement from my previous RSS feed arrangement in which the feeds were uncategorized and unalphabetized.

The biggest thing I like about Bloglines is the logical way it discards headlines that I've already looked at, unless I click the Keep New checkbox that's attached to each headline. This allows me to see that I've already read the important content on many sites while simultaneously helping me keep track of what I plan to blog later in the day.

Since my Bloglines account is server-based, I can hop on to one of the three other computers in my office anytime I need to, quickly pull up the feeds I am watching, and not lose a beat.

I think Bloglines is a great companion for the Movable Type backend. This means it would also work well with WordPress, Slash, and a number of other browser-based, weblog-oriented content management systems.

The proof of how much an RSS reader will help me will be if I can consistently turn out more high quality Operation Gadget stories in the same amount of time. So far, that's been the case by a wide margin.

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, let me know by email: daiello [at] operationgadget.com.