I subscribed to Bloglines because Karen Schneider has mentioned it so many times lately on Free Range Librarian. It is an alternative to other online news aggregators and I already find it more useful than having to download, install and maintain software updates on the operating systems that I compute on: Macintosh and Unix.

Apparently, it can also be used for electronic list tracking: Free Range Librarian: Santa Brought Me RSS E-list Tracking, but a later post says that feature is not quite working with e-lists that require a confirmation returned via e-mail from the subscribing address. It works if the e-list has an alternate Web interface that can be accessed with a code from the subscription confirmation mail.

As part of Dr. Deb Kapuk’s Library 248 Beginning Cataloging and Classification class, I need to subscribe to the Autocat e-list. I was able to do this through Bloglines because they offered clicking on a Web link to confirm. There are several things I like about this approach: You can use a separate @bloglines.com addresses for different e-lists, and you don’t have to clutter up your own mailbox on your computing system. The downside is that you cannot send mail from Bloglines, so this is really only useful for read-only subscriptions, or at least ones that you just plan to follow or skim. You cannot save e-list mail, or even forward it to yourself if it is something you want to save. It would not be reasonable to expect Bloglines to allow saving e-list e-mail, as that would cost them money and time computing resources. I will see how this goes for a few days.

Correction:
Well, I stand corrected. You can click on an email link on the e-list mail and resend it to your home or work computer for storage. You can also click on save. Using Apple Mail on my Mac, there are no carriage returns in the resent e-mail. Maybe that is the application. I will have to give it a try with a mail application in Windows.