There is so much great content out there in the form of blogs. More than I can ever hope to consume. And honestly, more sites than I can manage to keep up with on my own. For the longest time, I would bookmark a blog that I liked in my browser with the full intention of reading each blog on a regular basis. You know the rest of the story…I hardly ever went back to those blogs. There were a handful of sites that I would remember to check sporadically, but I was missing far more content that I was consuming.

It was driving me crazy. OK, driving me crazier than I already am.

I started searching for a solution for a problem I could sort of define, but couldn’t define in a way that I could type into Google and find a single result. I just couldn’t articulate it. The question in English was “how do you follow and consume blogs”. Google acted just like a search algorithm and couldn’t figure out what I meant.

In a stroke of genius, I asked the question to my online buddy Jeff Stephens of CrazyDadLife.com. While it’s not something that he’s ever covered in his podcast, it was the kind of question that I bounce off of him all the time. Poor guy, he gets all my inane questions…and he has to suffer through them at any time of the day or night. I ask when the question arises. To date, he hasn’t told me to jump off a bridge, so I haven’t stopped asking.

Anyway, he answered that he uses Feedly as his solution to that problem. I’ve been using Feedly for content ideas for some future projects, and it’s been very effective. I don’t know why I didn’t think to use it to follow blogs. It took Jeff’s words of wisdom to get me started doing that. So I started adding more and more blogger links to my Feedly configuration. It started to become more useful. But I still felt like there might be another solution out there.

About that time, I discovered the site Bloglovin that a bunch of folks were mentioning on Twitter. They were all new bloggers to me, and the whole bunch of them kept saying “follow me on Bloglovin”. I created an account and started following some folks there.

So I’ve run into a dilemma. I’ve got two different ways to follow blogs, and they seem to give me a slightly different take on things. Bloglovin a nice, clean newspaper view of the latest posts. It has a clear list of the blogs I’m following, as well as the number of posts on the blog that I haven’t read. Those are two really killer features for me. I can skim through the latests posts in one view or I can switch modes and do a deep dive into a particular blog. Then jump to a different one. Then another. It’s a cool way to review the blogs that I follow.

Feedly, on the other hand, has a view that allows me to see all the latest posts with less graphics. It’s a clean, clear list that has the blog and the title of the latest post. Lots of info on a single screen. The killer part of Feedly is that I can organize the blogs into categories. I have some really diverse interests, so I’ve got categories for things like productivity, recipes, parenting, cycling, and technology. I can do a deep dive into the technology category and not be side-tracked by an amazing bacon recipe. The ability to categorize is fantastic. Amazing. Life-changing.

So I’m sitting on the fence with these two solutions. I’ve taken to leaving each one open in a browser tab, and when I discover a new blog or site to follow…I add it to both Bloglovin and Feedly. It’s not the most efficient way of doing things, but it does allow me to follow lots of blogs and then slice-and-dice the results in different ways. For now it’s working OK.

The most important result is that I’ve started to be more systematic about looking at the content created on the blogs. I’m doing a much better job of consuming the posts, and I’m feeling less like things are slipping by. That may not sound like much of an improvement, but to me it’s been absolutely amazing.

What are you using to follow your favorite blogs?