When Feedburner's "FollowByEmail" Widget Goes Away

I've never followed a blog by email.  I think receiving an email for every post from every blog I follow would be overwhelming.  But Feedburner tells me that 1312 readers have subscribed to emails for this blog so some people must like subscribing to blogs that way.  I think most of them must delete the emails without reading just as I might if I followed blogs via email.

This is the notice we Blogspot bloggers received a week or two ago.  Click to enlarge it if you'd like to read all of it.

Basically, it says that the Feedburner email subscription service will be discontinued in July, which means that if you follow this blog via email you'll no longer receive those email updates for each post.  I don't know how (and am not interested in learning how) to send emails to everyone.  But I can recommend a few other ways to follow this and other blogs.

Google Friend Connect (known to some as Followers) and Blogger Reading List might work for you if you have a Blogspot blog.  Many of us have a widget somewhere on our blogs inviting  you to follow.  Mine is to the right and up a little if you're reading this on a desk- or laptop computer.  (I don't know how it looks on a phone.  Sorry.)  Clicking to become a follower/friend will place our blogs in your Blogger Reading List.  You can find that reading list on your Blogger dashboard, left column at the bottom.  You can add any blog to your reading list.

Feedly is my preferred method of following blogs.  It's a free service but you'll need to create an account, then you can add blogs to your list.  I love Feedly because I can click through to a blog and it also lets me read blog posts without going directly to each individual blog.  There are positives and negatives to this.  One negative is that I may not visit a blog unless I want to leave a comment.  One positive, for me, is that I can read many blog posts quickly.  Another positive is that the photos are usually larger in Feedly than on a blog.  And a third positive is that when I click through to the blog post, I can open the comment box, then write my comment without having to scroll up and down the post to look at the photos and read because I can change tabs and look at the post on Feedly.  That may not work for some readers but I like doing it that way.   There are a few bloggers who set their blogs to show only a few lines or the first paragraph of a blog post on Feedly.

Bloglovin' is another way to follow blogs.  It's free, too.  You'll need to create an account and then add blogs to your list.  Bloglovin' shows one photo from a post and if you click on the photo to go to the blog, you usually won't go directly to the blog but to Bloglovin's version of the blog within Bloglovin'.

I know there are other ways to read blogs (RSS feeds, as they're called) but I don't have information about them.  But these two posts, here and here, review several other options for following blogs.  If I learn more I'll edit this post.

What ways do you read blogs?  Do you follow via email, or do you use a reader or something else?

--Nancy.