Another Post About Google Reader and Bloglovin!

If you read a lot of blogs (like I do) you'll have noticed a wealth of people posting about the closure of Google Reader. I'm not entirely sure what the consequences will be to my GFC followers when it shuts down on 1st July, but if you use Google Reader to keep up with your blogs then you'll definitely need to find an alternative.

As a reader of blogs myself, I decided to sign up for Bloglovin' on the recommendation of Lucy over at Queen of Contemporary. After a few days of playing about with it I've decided it's the site for me! So I wanted to do a little blog about it to explain how it works.

It's free to sign up (you'll need an account by either logging in with an email or your Facebook account) and once you're on there, you can start following blogs either by searching manually or by importing your blogs from Google Reader. (It took me a few goes to import my blogs but then I realised you just need to be logged into the right Google account when you try and import them - duh!).

Once you've followed a few blogs they'll start showing up in your feed on the home page. Unread posts are marked and they'll switch to read once you've clicked through to read the post, or you can manually mark them as read. This makes it super easy to keep up the latest posts. I would definitely recommend downloading the app which is really handy for reading on the go. I use my iPod touch a lot for checking things like Twitter and I'll now be adding Bloglovin' into that routine. You can also "like" posts which makes it really easy to go back and find posts you want to remember or look up again.

What's great is that it works for both Blogger and Wordpress blogs so now I can follow them all in one place - hurrah!

If you want to get ahead of the game before Google reader closes then you can now follow Total Teen Fiction on Bloglovin'. There's a button in the sidebar over there ---> or you can find the blog at the following link:

Total Teen Fiction on Bloglovin'

If you're looking for other ways to keep up with my posts in future then I also use NetworkedBlogs which is another alternative. Again it's easy to follow blogs and have them all in one place. You sign up using your Facebook account. You can find Total Teen Fiction on NetworkedBlogs here:

Total Teen Fiction on NetworkedBlogs

But don't panic! I still link all my posts to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr as well as adding all my reviews to Goodreads, so it won't be too hard to track me down!

I hope that's made things fairly clear. I was totally confused by all the Google Reader talk because I'm not that up on my tech, but basically looking for a new way to read blogs is sounding like a sensible idea right now. Do you have any other recommendations for ways to keep up with your favourite blogs? Let me know in the comments because I'd love to check them out! If this post has confuzzled you then let me know that too and I'll do my best to make it clearer.

Thank you so much for following and supporting Total Teen Fiction. You're all awesome!