How To Use & Switch To Feedly

The other day I published a post titled  4 Changes I’ve Noticed in the Blogosphere. In that post, I mentioned how I’ve noticed some people have gone away from Bloglovin’ in favor of other options. Some have gone to just using WordPress Reader, others have moved towards Feedly. I noticed in the comments of that post a trend – some people don’t actually know much about Feedly! So, I thought I would go back to my Blog Help days and do a little “How-To” so-to-speak. If you are at all interested in what Feedly is, how to use it, how to transfer the blogs you follow, keep reading!

A quick introduction to Feedly: Feedly is just another RSS feed aggregator just like Bloglovin’ or WordPress Reader. Same exact concept, different execution.

FEEDLY HOME PAGE

This is the home page of Feedly where you can get a glance at everything available to you. I’ll be zooming in on some main components in this post but I just wanted to share a quick rundown. With Feedly you can:

1. Create feed categories
2. Create boards to pin posts to
3. Quickly add new blogs to follow
4. Easily manage your lists

CREATING CATEGORIES

If you follow a variety of blogs or maybe want to separate out book blogs by genre or how often you visit, you can do so easily with Feedly.

You can do it either when you go to follow a new blog (which I’ll demonstrate later), or you can simply click “Create New Feed” in the left sidebar.

I’ve personally kept mine fairly simple since I mainly just follow book blogs & just go down the list when blog hopping – but you can get super organized if you’d like!

CREATING BOARDS

You can also create boards, similar to collections on Bloglovin’, so that you can save posts while blog hopping.

Again, mine is straight forward – and brand new – so I don’t have anything saved to them yet. However, these are the same boards I had for Bloglovin’. When you read a post, there are icons you can click to quickly add posts to boards. I’ll show this next.

READING BLOG POSTS

There are two ways you can read a post in Feedly: 1. Simply click on it and it will open within Feedly, or my preferred method, 2. Right-click & open in a new tab to visit the blog itself, not Feedly’s version of the post.

If you do read it within Feedly, there are many options for saving and sharing at the top of the page, however, if you use my method, then what you would use is what I’ve enclosed in the Blue rectangle below.

Icons from left to right:
Read Later → Save to Board → Mark as Read → Mark as Read & Hide.
(Or, if you accidentally clicked something and don’t want it to automatically mark as read, the Mark as Read button becomes Mark as Unread).

ADDING NEW BLOGS

Adding new blogs is also super easy! If they have a Feedly button on their blog, just click that. If not, copy their URL, go to Feedly, click on ADD CONTENT on the bottom left of the page, paste their URL into the search bar. If their blog comes up, you’ll see what is in the photo below. Click FOLLOW, you’ll then be able to select which Category you want that blog to go into.

Alternatively, if you already have WordPress Reader or Bloglovin, you can IMPORT your blogs which I will discuss in the next topic.

MANAGING BLOGS YOU FOLLOW & IMPORTING FROM OTHER SITES

IMPORTING: To import blogs from places like Bloglovin’ or WordPress Reader you’ll need to import the OPML file. Click the gear icon, shown left, and there will be an IMPORT OPML option on the right of the page. But how do you get the OPML from the external sites? Easy!

On Bloglovin’: Make sure you are logged into your account and go to THIS LINK. Click Download File.

On WordPress: Go to your Reader → Followed Sites → Manage → Click the three dots →  Select Export.

Once you’ve done that, just Import the files as described above. Now, when I did this, nearly HALF of the blogs I imported were automatically put under Uncategorized. Don’t fret, you do not have to go to each one individually to reorganize them. This is where the rest of the GEAR ICON features come into play.

Clicking on the gear icon will allow you to:

1.  Mass recategorize
2.  Mass unfollow inactive blogs
3. Remove blogs that cannot communicate with Feedly

I think that about covers it! I’m also fairly new to using Feedly, but I find the interface a lot easier than Bloglovin’. If you have any questions, please ask! If I forgot something or got something wrong, please let me know! So, what do you think? Do you use Feedly? Do you think you’ll switch?

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