Monday 27 December 2010

12 days of Christmas - Post 3 On blogs and keeping up with them

I feel like I am on a roll - 3 posts in 2 days is a pretty big achievement for me at the moment, considering how long it had been previously between posts.

So onto keeping up with all my blogs. I previously used Bloglines to keep up with my blogs, not that I had many that I checked on a regular basis. I eventually decided to switch to Google Reader, mainly for the ease of having one login.

What I like most about reading other people's blogs is the fact that they lead you to more and more blogs, more interesting reading, more things to read that are in my area of interest. Initially I was only adding library related blogs, those that I felt were professionally linked to my career. Over time, blogs related to my hobbies of knitting and scrapbooking were duly added to my reader. Over time, these additions started to spiral out of control! To manage these more efficiently, I added labels to every blog (I guess I catalogued them :) ) and started to cull those I had added on a whim and decided held no interest for me (I weeded them :) ). Any that did not show the full feed in my reader were removed too. I use my reader to save me time and save me blog hopping. If I need to go to a blog to read the entire post, then to me that defeats the purpose of having it in my reader in the first place.

Then came the task of 'keeping' posts that I liked and wanted to refer to later - aaah the beauty of starring an item! Then, of course, the dilemma of TOO MANY starred items! I go through these every now and then and remove stars if I feel a post has outlived its usefulness. It does happen. (Never with @polyxena posts though!)

Using Google Reader has enabled me to check my favourite blogs on a regular basis in a much more efficient and timely manner than previously. This is very good for me, considering how many more blogs I have added to my reader since the 12 days of Christmas challenge started :)

Out of curiosity, how many of you have added my blog to your rss reader?