Bloglovin - Review

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Let’s start today off with a new favorite website of mine: BlogLovin‘. BlogLovin’ solves a very simple but annoying problem. It consolidates all your favorite blogs and their posts into one place.

This may seem pretty superfluous but when you love upwards of 40 food/tech/style blogs and are constantly looking for inspiration it can be really tedious to try and 1.) remember all of the blog names, creative as they may be and 2.) sift through a pile of browser bookmarks. I’d been saving blogs on my chrome browser in a special folder for months but thanks to my secure google log-in it was impossible to view them on my phone…

And then I stumbled across BlogLovin’ by clicking on a social media icon I didn’t recognize on someone else’s blog. It was truly an AH HA! moment. The process is simple, set up an account, search for the blogs you love, then log-in to see all their postings in one place.

What follows is a quick review and two how-to’s on setting up an account and claiming your blog. If you’re interested then read on!

BlogLovin' Stats

Intuitive User Interface - 75%

Blogs Available - 90%

Claiming/Setting Up Your Blog - 60%

General User Set Up - 80%

After Set Up Maintenance - 90%

Accessibility - 90%

81%

BlogLovin' is super user friendly and low-maintenance once you've set up which blogs you follow. There are a few bugs in the website's ability to count how many posts are waiting to be read but the choice of blogs is excellent, with most major blogs present and easy to follow.

User Rating: Be the first one !

Quick notes: I love the overall ease and experience of using this website. It’s made my blog reading life spectacularly easier and is ideal for those who want to look at a lot of blogs at once. That said there are a few bugs still left in the system. The count of unread articles can go a little haywire at times (even showing negative numbers) and when you follow a blog for the first time you get flooded with all of their recent posts in your feed. That said, all you have to do is mark the posts you’re uninterested in as read and they’ll be pushed to the bottom of your feed on refresh. On the accessibility note, there are apps to access your feed from all Apple and Android devices, as a train-riding commuter I seriously appreciate this feature.

Setting Up BlogLovin’

Though BlogLovin’ is pretty intuitive lets quickly walk through the steps of setting up your account and following blogs!

First step is super easy! Pop on over to bloglovin.com and click the signup link of choice (I prefer email personally but to each their own!).[one_half][/one_half] [one_half_last][/one_half_last]

1. After you’ve set yourself up you’ll be asked to find some blogs you’d like to follow! You can peruse popular blogs and sift through categories if you’d like or if you’re impatient like me you can use the search bar (top right corner). [one_half]
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   Be sure to choose the right option! Following “Comments on” is not the same as following a blog
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2. You can always find out more about a blog by clicking on it’s name. BlogLovin’ will show you their recent posts and images so you can decide whether or not that blog is the right fit for you! (Ignore my dismal number of followers – I’m a blog on here as of roughly a couple of days…)
3. Should you want to unfollow someone: Click on the link to the Blog’s name (not the post name) in your feed. Then when on that posts page click on the button that says “following”. This will unfollow the blog.
   

You’re good to go! Interested in getting your blog onto BlogLovin’? Read on!

Claiming Your Blog on BlogLovin’

Now what if you’re a blogger and want your blog to be indexed by this super fabulous site? First things first, you have to have an RSS feed set up for this to work. So if you haven’t done that yet you’ll want to.

1. In your newly acquired BlogLovin’ account click on the little circle in between the search bar and the alert bell:
2. In the drop down menu click “your blogs”
   
3. Once the page loads click “Claim your blog” and in the search box that pops up (image on bottom) paste your full blog URL
4. If you’ve got an RSS feed you’re blog should be recognized, select your blog and you’ll be given a snippet of code to paste into a new post (it will display as a BlogLovin’ button). I created a blank posting (if you do it this way, wait ’til off-hours so your readers aren’t confused) with the button in it, published it and then popped back over to BlogLovin’ to confirm that the connection had gone through.
5. Once you make the connection to BlogLovin’ it may take a little while for all of your recent posts to be indexed. Don’t worry they will show up!

Note: If you can’t get your blog to appear in search, check out the support link for that here or for BlogLovin’s notes on claiming your blog look at this page.