Sunday, March 17, 2013

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

Turn and face the strange.

Well, I guess fun fact week will not be concluded. Yesterday was busy. I ran out of time and energy! We had a good run though, huh?

Today we'll move on and speak of forced technological change. Say a good bye to the Google Reader. Apologize to Heather. And bring up a topic that may now be keeping me up at night. (Woo, all that in one blog!)

So Google announced this week that it is killing the Google Reader. For those who don't know, the Google Reader is a way to maintain a list of websites one is interested in. For me specifically, it is the home to all the blogs I follow. When I first found out my friends had blogs, I had a ritual in which every day I pulled up each blog to see if there was a new exciting post waiting for me! With some bloggers, Heather for example!!, you could expect this excitement daily. Others (and I won't name names), go months without updating!  This made it hard to want to pull up their blog daily - risking continual disappointment. It also made one likely to forget about their blog, risking missing out when they finally got around to saying something.

Google reader came to the rescue. Enter a blog address in Google reader and every time someone blogs, their new blog will pop up to the top! Issue solved. And, now that I'm following about 30 blogs, it saves space in my more poor brain for other things (ie I don't have to remember all the blogs I want to look up). Phew!

So, now that the reader is disappearing, I (along with 500,000 others according to news articles), moved over to Feedly. Feedly offers a similar service and allowed me to put in my Google login credentials and transfered all my blogs over for me!  Sweet!!  The only issue is getting used to new navigation and a new layout AND some weird something. There was a list of blogs I follow on the right, the top one being my friend Heather. I clicked on something that I thought would allow me to see her blog, instead it swooped her blog right off my lists of blogs I follow. AND when I click the lists of actual blog entries, her latest posts are no where to be found. I keep trying to add her, but Feedly just says I am already following her.

Hmmmm. As the girls on the bachelor say (and they are all 'girls'), I can only hope and pray her blog reappears when there is a new update. Sorry Heather!

And finally, all this stress has introduced a new worry into my life. Google's whims and blogspot. What if Google decided to get rid of their blog site?  (This is a particular worry, as the Reader and Blogspot are very integrated.) What if all my 4.5 years of blogs, some of which are pure brilliance, were gone in a swoop of some Google employees keyboard. That would make me unbelievable sad!  How can I save these?????

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This does suck! Behold the power of Google. Thanks for the week of entries though. I enjoyed them! Any garden updates?

To Blog or Not to Blog said...

Nothing is happening in the garden except weeds!! Will be buying starters this year. So my future vegetables are probably getting their start in someone else's house.