Creating Blogrolls in Google Reader

In case you missed the announcement, Google has rolled out a new feature in Google Reader that enables bloggers to create blogrolls based on their Reader subscriptions.

Such nifty capability to produce blogrolls may not be new for a lot of bloggers as several feed aggregators like Bloglines and a well-known pioneer site in making blogrolls, Blogrolling, offer the same service. Some may think such services are already neat, but others may see them as quite "out of touch" in terms of integration with most ever-developing blogging platforms.

Blogging newbies would consider Blogrolling convenient and effective already in maintaining a blogroll, as did I when I discovered blogs. But at some point, you would realize that surely there is much better than that especially if you get tired of visiting another site just to update your blogrolls.

Now comes this feature in Google Reader and I'd say that this is the ultimate way of creating blogrolls -- integrated with a very user-friendly Google product at that!

So now let me tell you some how-to tips in creating a blogroll in Google Reader:

1. Subscribe to your favorite blogs using Google Reader. If you're not yet a Reader user but is browsing using Mozilla Firefox, one easy way to do this is to open all the blogs listed in your existing blogroll and, one-by-one in each blog, click on the RSS button located in the right-most end of the address bar opposite the site's address. If an RSS button does not appear in the address bar, subscribe by clicking the "Add to Google", RSS or any feed icon that you can find somewhere in the blog. Another way to subscribe to a site is to do it directly in Google Reader: just copy and paste the blog's address in the "+Add subscription" field.

2. Tag each blog you've just subscribed to in Reader. Go to a subscribed blog and from the 'Feed settings...' pull-down menu, tag the blog by creating and adding it to a 'New folder' (e.g., "My Blogroll"). Do this for each of the blog you'd like to be included in your blogroll.

3. Change the folder's sharing setting to 'Public'. By default, all newly created folders in Reader are private. To change the setting, go to the Reader 'Settings' page then to 'Tags'. Select or tick your "My Blogroll" folder and from the "Change sharing.." pull-down menu, choose 'Public'.

4. Add your blogroll script into your blog's template. Instantly after doing the previous step, the "add a blogroll to your site" link should appear opposite your "My Blogroll" folder. Click on the link to pop up the "Put a Blogroll on your site" page. Customize the would-be appearance of your blogroll in your blog, copy the script and paste it in the part of your blog where your old blogroll used to be.

5. Rename your subscriptions. Now, you may want to change the names of the blogs as they appear in your Reader blogroll. To rename them to your wishes, go to the 'Feed settings...' pull-down menu and choose 'Rename subscription...'.

There you are, now you can easily organize and manage your blogroll while reading and keeping updated with all your favorite blogs through Google Reader.
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This is cross-posted in my other blog, Planet Google.