In my recent nesting stage, I have not only managed to get my house in order, but my brain has found some peace, as well. For the last 2 years I have been living in total chaos. We found out in May of 2007 we were going to move. That move was delayed and delayed and delayed again, finally occurring in December of 2007. We had two temporary living arrangements before finally moving into our own h
ome in September of 2008. Here it is, almost September of 2009 and I finally feel like I am gaining a handle on my life…music to my ears. Now that I feel like I can breathe in my own home, I am also able to clear a bunch of cobwebs out of my brain. It feels good to finally have a little control in my life.
One cobweb I finally took control over is blog reading. It was all I could do to get my own 2 blogs posted in a day, if that. I had no time to keep up with all my friends blogs on a regular basis like I wanted. When my blogs were accidentally deleted last year by deleting an email address, my surprise rescue came, not from Google or Blogger, but from a friend who had a blog reader. I had no idea what it was or how to use it, but it had managed to save and retrieve many of my lost blogs and I wanted to be a part of it.
From what I could find, Google Reader and Bloglines are the most popular blog readers. All you do is sign up for free and enter the blogs you want to keep up with. When a new post is published on one of your blogs, it appears in your reader. VOILA! What an enormous amount of time it saves having to check your favorite blogs all the time. Now, I can not only keep up with my friends blogs, but I have found several other fun ones (that I will share with you soon) that I now have the time to read. The great part about the reader is that when it pops on the screen, if it doesn’t interest me, I just keep reading down to another blog and mark that one as “read.”
Maybe I am the last person in the computer world to “get” this, but I really don’t think I am. Someone out there has to be slower than me….right? I subscribed to both Google and Bloglines to determine which one I liked best. I was already painfully frustrated with Google for deleting my blog and not helping me retrieve it, but even without that negative influence, I still think I would like Bloglines better. Without intending to,Bloglines has become my blog reader of choice. What I love most about it, is that there is an icon you can install on your computer. When there is a new post from one of my subscriptions, a little red mark shows up in my bottom right hand corner alerting me to the update(s). This way, I don’t even have to check my reader unless I see that red mark. Also, once you are established with Bloglines, if you are on a blog you like, all you have to do is scroll down to “Subscribe with Bloglines” in your Favorites and it automatically subscribes you to that blog…without you having to type anything! Or, like in the left column on Penelope’s Pitstop, many blogs have a “Subscribe” section that you merely have to click to subscribe to the blog feed from that page. Technology is amazing. Anything to save time, right?
I am, by no means, a computer expert. I just know that Bloglines has cut my computer time down significantly and opened lots of fun doors by allowing me to keep up with blogs other than just my friends. I have found some really fun blogs and websites and am spending no more time on the computer.
That, my friends, is music to my husbands ear!
