Some bloglines ideas

Here are some suggestions to make bloglines even better, at least to me ;-)

  • Allow the left frame be moved to the right side instead and allow hiding it. The list of blogs takes too much room when reading on a vertically oriented screen (Tablet PC).
  • Having an option to display only the titles, show the excerpt with a click and CSS. Big excerpts and large blogrolls make up for a lot of scrolling. This could be done by allowing each user to customize the site with his own CSS and/or javascript (bloglines would only have to store the url for the css and js files). I'm sure hackers would come up with tons of cool tweaks if that kind of customization was supported.
  • Allow rating posts (help identify low signal/noise blogs in my list) and monitor my clicks on links (that's an implicit rating).
  • Offer a solution for tracking comments that I posted on other people's blogs, as I mentioned recently.

Update: Bloglines now lets you choose between a couple of display options for entries (titles, summaries, ...) and allows you to ignore updated items.

Update (2005/09/21): Start.com implemented the concept of loading distributed components (javascript + CSS). It's called gadgets. Pretty powerful stuff.

Posted by Julien on March 15, 2004. Permalink
Comments

I agree with your ideas and I also think they could implement a "tools" page that had all of their features in one place.

They aren't exactly hard to find as they are, but when I first started using Bloglines I always had to hunt for the public blogs page and the export to OPML features.

Personally, I think they could use a new logo and color scheme too, but that's a different ball of wax.

Posted by: Marcus Vorwaller at March 15, 2004 04:45 PM

One think they have that is very cute is the "plumber" error message when they are doing maintenance.
It got me thinking about how I could have a customized 404 error page for my sites: me doing faces with a cartoonish question mark ;-)

Posted by: Dumky at March 15, 2004 05:40 PM

Word. Love the stylesheets idea. I wish you could only show items that have new content as well.

Posted by: Eric at March 16, 2004 03:31 PM

"Having an option to display only the titles"

All your suggestions are good, but this is the killer one for me. It's the only thing preventing me using bloglines fulltime.

Posted by: Steve Cayzer at March 29, 2004 06:52 AM
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