Thing #9 Too Many Blogs, Too Little Time

I have a pretty extensive list of blogs in my blogroll over at my other blog. I collected those blogs thru a variety of ways over the last 3+ years and finally dropped them in my blog about 14 months ago when I finally broke down and created one!

My history with blogs started with teenage angst blogs and that is NOT a great way to start, believe me! Then I started hearing/reading about blogging leaders in education and particularly, librarianship, through conferences and professional websites and journals. Can't remember the first batch too much, but really caught the blog fever at the Texas Library Association conference a few years ago when I attended two sessions on the subject.

More recently, I have used the traditional methods of discovering blogs to follow. I do check out award winners such as found at Edublogs and I use web sites such as Technorati to see who has connected to my blog...it is always such a surprise who picks up my blog thru the tags I have included there and words in my posts! I am currently following several Google Alerts for blog content that is of interest as well. Another way I find and follow blog postings is to read someone else's public reader page. In other words, I let an expert pull the materials I should read! Works for me!

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But I have found most of the blogs I follow and many of my very favorite blogs by checking out what other bloggers post about, have on their blogrolls, and thru birdwalks from one blog to another, to another, to another. This is why Google notebook should prove to be helpful to me.

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I have many blogs not on my blogroll simply because I read them for fun. Some include friends' blogs and non-educationally based blogs. I enjoy the subjects like recipes or places where people live, but mostly importantly, these non-work-related blogs are just plain fun to read. The writers are talented story tellers and can make a great story out of a crazy beagle, squirrels in the belfry, travels to bookstores or around the world, and make me laugh every time I open their blogs!

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My current problem because of all these blogs...I need to cull out the dead wood...blogs that have not updated in awhile, have changed the focus and I don't follow that line of thought, or just plain don't say it with the same enthusiasm as someone else I read as well. Maybe if I can around to doing this, my list will be a better fit for the time I can devote to it all!

See you around the pad,

Froggy Wart

Thing #8 I'm a Reader Readin' Fool!

I have known about the little orange icons and RSS boxes on web sites for a few years. I never forced myself to learn the "how to" make one for my stuff...didn't figure I had enough worthy info.

During this early period, I knew it would be useful to subscribe to feeds of some of the things I followed regularly...until I really saw how it worked (or at least used to work)...I was at a conference and the presenter was using the Internet as part of his presentation and all thru his talk, the little pop up came up telling him something was updated...DROVE ME CRAZY! I knew that was not something for me...so I relied on bookmarks/favorites and even things like I Keep Booksmarks so I would always have the things I wanted to check handy.

Then I discovered the readers about a year or so ago. Bingo! That is what I wanted. A way to keep up where I could read on my own timeline...and no bothersome pop-ups...and I didn't have to be a computer genius to figure how to get the code, etc.

I played a bit with Bloglines, but it had a little too much "geekiness" for me...had to understand the behind-the-scenes code stuff a little too much and I didn't care too much for how it "looked." Don't mean to sound negative...I know bunches of bloggers who use it quite successfully and many more who will use it.

My reader of choice is Google Reader. I took to it immediately...it was easy to set up and because it fit with all my other Google stuff, I could sign in with the same information. It is a very necessary tool in my work and my free time reading. I follow way-too-many blogs and web sites to go to each one individually. I have set up folders for different types of information so that I can check on groups of blogs at different times. For example, I have put all the L2P players in a folder so I can see who has written new posts in their blogs with out having to go down the ever-growing list of Players!

I have added my public page of my Google Reader to my sidebar. It is made up of bloggers who blog about children's and YA books and authors. The only weakness of this service is I wish I could make several public pages from the same list of subscriptions in my reader. In other words, to have separate lists of children's books and authors and YA books and authors, I would have to set up separate subscription lists and sign in differently...in essence, become a separate person. Nope, not going to do it...the point of the reader is to have everything in one place accessible from any Internet-connected computer I happen to be around. So, Google, if you are listening (oops, reading) think about this issue. You would make me a really happy camper!

Ok, I'm jumpin' over to #9,
Froggy Wart


P.S. In looking for some artwork for this post, I came across this site that helps you create RSS graphics for free. I won't be using it, but there is someone out there who might want to do it!