Following crafty blogs has never got old for me. I get so much inspiration from reading about other crafty people’s projects and lives. It took me a long while to work out what an RSS feed was, however. I think I did when I got a Mac and discovered that if I bookmarked the feed of a blog in Safari a handy little number would appear beside the bookmark if there was a new post to see.

So I was rather annoyed when the feature disappeared from Safari when I upgraded the operating system. Sure, you could now put your feeds in Mail, but the corresponding Mail app on the iPhone and iPad didn’t have that feature so I could no longer snatch bits of time here and there catch up on blogs.

I looked into sites and apps but they all seemed to involve signing up to Google. Not that I was avoiding Google, it’s just that since they took over Yahoo it seems a different combination of my yahoo/google username and password work each time I try to sign in, and now I avoid having to sign in at all. Yeah, I know that’s pathetic, but I’ve never had anything important enough to do to force me to sort it out.

When I heard Google Reader was on the way out I was glad I hadn’t wasted my time. People began recommending other RSS feed apps and sites, but it seemed they all required my Google username and password or else a Facebook login. (I also don’t do Facebook.) That was, until one of the bloggers I follow, over at Kootoyoo, posted that she was switching to Bloglovin’ as it didn’t use Google Reader. I checked it out and it didn’t use Facebook login’s either. And there’s an iPhone app. Sweet!

So I’ve signed up to Bloglovin’ and I’m lovin’ it. The interface is clear and you can separate blogs into categories. The iPhone app works fine for catching up on blogs during morning tea or tv ad breaks. I’ve ‘claimed’ my blog on the site, too, so it’s easy to find. Or you could just click on the link in the sidebar.