More and more of my friends have blogs, and the way I dealt with this was to use the "Open in Tabs" feature of Firefox. This conveniently would open a tab for each page, and then I could check for updates by flipping through them.
Tabbed browsing, by the way, is critical to me; I cannot imagine going back to Internet Explorer and being stuck with a new browser for each page. Much less opening each page one at a time!
A recent update to Firefox introduced live bookmarks, a way to view RSS feeds. RSS feeds, in turn, basically summarize a site's contents, and many popular blogging sites automatically create RSS feeds for other programs to use.
Well, the live bookmarks worked OK - what it did is create a folder for each site, and then listed each entry as a page in that folder. Handy, but it wasn't a good system for checking 20+ sites - I'd have to hover the mouse over each bookmark and wait for it to load the data. Doing this for 20+ sites was a drag.
Today, I stumbled on a nice, easy to use, news aggregator called Feedreader. This program understands both popular RDF summary standards (RSS and Atom), and works great - so far! I added in all the sites I normally poll via Firefox into Feedreader, and now I can click on a tree view and see the latest posts. I've configured Feedreader to check each site once every four hours, so I'll leave the program running and tomorrow morning I should be able to see updates without actually checking every site.
As far as my friend's blogs, those are now mostly covered. Blogspot and LiveJournal generate Atom feeds... pretty much I can check everybody's blogs except three friends: one friend who rolls her own blog (Breigh), and two who use Xanga, which apparently doesn't create an RSS feed for non-Xanga users.
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