Blogroll and Feed Readers
Markings #19 ©2008 56" x 58"
Beta Bloglines
For the last year I’ve let my blogroll mostly stagnate – not just on my blog but also in my feedreader. There is a proliferation of excellent blogs out there and I just couldn’t keep up. The dual maintenance of adding a blog to both my feedreader and my blogroll was too much to think about.
I want to catch up to some of the great blogs I’ve run across out in the wild and also by many of you that comment on my blog. The first step was to make this a manageable process and find a feed reader that would do these things:
- Keep track of my read vs. unread articles for me as I travel between home and work. This pretty much required it be webbased
- Have a simple mechanism for organizing the feeds, preferably drag and drop organization.
- Provide a mechanism to share my list of feeds so I could avoid dual maintenance.
- Provide an efficient mechanism for reading through my unread articles quickly.
Beta Bloglines is the only reader (out of the entire two I thought about) that fulfilled those requirements. Google reader is nice but it doesn’t provide that type of sharing I am after. If it had, I would have selected it.
This morning I finished moving my current blogroll over to bloglines and I’ve updated my sidebar.
My Blogroll
What I’ve left on my website are just a handful of my most favorite links (I wasn’t ready to nuke the entire blogroll!) That’s not to say I don’t love and read tons of other blogs and I recommend all of the blogs on my list.
I feel my blogroll is out of date. I know I ran across some really great blogs the last year and I failed to subscribe to them. So as I find them again, I will add them. Consider this a work in progress.
I’m not so sure about my organization of the folders. I had too many people in the ‘artist’ category so I broke it in 2 parts – it’s not very intuitive. So I suspect that will be changing when something strikes me as more useful.
What am I Talking About
If you have no idea what a feed reader is or how you might use one. Or even more importantly, how to make sure your blog can be read by a feed reader, check out Katherine Tyrrell’s, as usual, excellent post on how to do this. And don’t worry – by default blogger and wordpress.com blogs have feeds so you are probably fine.
Full or Short Content
My only caveat about her post, as I mentioned in her comments. I really don’t recommend posting only a short summary of your posts in your feeds. Interestingly I was planning to post on this exact topic as soon as I finished my blogroll update.
People are lazy. We spend inordinate amounts of time at my day job thinking about how to reduce the number of clicks needed to do anything in our products because people don’t like to click. They tend to stop doing things that require too much effort. In my opinion having to click an article and leave a feed reader to see the content counts as too much hassle.
I don’t share Katherine’s concern about the dangers or risks of content scraping. She has valid points for her – I just view it differently. Yes – people steal my content – but I do not believe it harms me. My images are hotlink protected so it’s just my words floating around out there on splogs and I just can’t get excited or worried enough about it to care. I don’t track them down and I don’t see it being a big deal. Maybe I’m blissfully ignorant, but blissful is the keyword and it’s working for me.
The big names I read, such as Seth Godin and Gapingvoid, all publish their full content. So I figure I’m in good company.
So as a reader that is lazy – I request and recommended your feed always be the full content of your site.
Markings #19
This is one of the 3 pieces completed in 2008 included in my show Markings: Repetition and Pattern, which closes on March 19th in Boulder.
I love this piece. I know, I’ve said that about many of the pieces in this show. Once I got the show hung my fear that this series was not so good evaporated. I’m pretty excited about many of these pieces and have ideas for more.
I love the red here. I love the small piece of blue-gray interrupting the pattern and making it more interesting. I love how I moved beyond straight horizontal lines between rows. It was a trick to construct this piece but it made for a fun challenging puzzle, part of why I love working with the construction processes I use.
Detail image:
Posted by Lisa in: Abstract Contemporary Textile Art, blogging
Tagged: blogging, blogroll, feed readers, markings series, Markings: Repetition and Pattern
I agree about the truncated posts. I rarely click through on truncated posts (project rungay is the only exception that I *always* click through) – and if it is just the name of the post only, you might as well hang a sign on your blog that “I don’t want anyone to read what I am writing”. Yea… the splogs tick me off, but I get over them and ignore them.
The quilt is beautiful!!!
Lisa, I can imagine that all of these hanging together make a wonderful statement.
I also use Bloglines and was wondering if I was missing something elsewhere… glad to let you do the research ;-) I’m also a lazy reader but I feel we miss the ambiance of a blog’s real setting which often is part of the writer’s personality and adds to the spirit of the message. But when you’re behind and hurrying to catch up, the full script with photos on a reader is appreciated.
Thank Kim and Cindy. Kim – glad to know I’m not the only lazy one.
Karen – I totally agree about the blog’s real setting. It’s quite an adjustment for me to go from my old reader, where each post lived in it’s native blog home, to bloglines. It feels naked in some ways. Efficiency has it’s price I suppose.
Another cheer for full feeds. I’ve been passing on that extra click a lot lately, I figure I’m already wasting too much time reading blogs. The feed reader allows me to get a visual and then I can make a decision about how much time I want to spend reading the text.
I’m also a Seth Godin fan, I also added in Dosh Dosh (discovered via Seth’s blog) to my reading list. I rationalize those reads as ‘business related activities’.
Must chime in with a thumbs up for full feeds. Find myself skipping those posts. Even those with catchy titles, etc. Too many great blogs out there with full feeds to read….
Love the quilt. Use of color… wow.
Thanks Lisa – I’m doing a little round-up of posts about feedburners and feedreaders this week in Who’s made a mark this week and this post is included.
This Markings series is very elegant and they’re all wonderful. But I particularly like this red one. :) I’ve used Bloglines for a while now and the other day the title of your blog on my list suddenly changed to Contemporary Textile Art. I thought I had lost you for a moment but it had the same little logo button. Then I read that you had changed your blog….I guess it picked up on that right away.
Cathy K – you liked red! :) Yeah – I’ve been meaning to write about the title change but it hasn’t bubbled to the top of my head yet to be written about.
Katherine – thanks for the mention.
and Kathy (it’s the day for kath type names to respond!) – I’ll have to check out dosh dosh. I think reading Seth’s blog is very legit use of business time. His ideas really spark cool ideas for me.
Sarah – I agree – and thank you!
Since you obviously have a Feedburner account for managing subscribers to your blog I suggest that you also use this for new readers who wish to elect to receive e-mail notification of new posts. From a reader perspective, Feedburner is preferable to Feedblitz because it allows you to sign up for e-mail subscriptions without the rigmarole of setting up an account. (That is, Feedblitz requires you to set up Feedblitz account whereas Feedburner doesn’t.)
Thanks for the info Brenda – I’ll look into it. When I set up feedblitz almost 3 years ago it was the recommended way to go as feedburner was having serious problems with their mail subscriptions. Time to reevaluate.