Keeping track of blogs

2 March 2010

Since I started blogging a while back, one of the most rewarding and interesting things has been finding other blogs to read. I have discovered and regularly visit many fine blogs, ranging from political polemics to poetic pictures. One thing I hadn’t really figured out was how to keep track of new posts, so I have occasionally missed a post or two. The major problem was that I follow blogs using different platforms, sites and programmes. So, for example, some blogs appear on my Blogger dashboard, whereas others only appear when I log into Blogcatalog or Yahoo! Japan. As well as missing new posts, this was highly inefficient and time-consuming.

One way to keep up-to-date with the new posts was to place a blogroll on this blog, and accordingly I had added a few lists. However, after a month, it became increasingly clear that these blogrolls took up quite a bit of space and they didn’t really fit into the scheme of things. For that reason, I removed the blogrolls. I did so reluctantly, because I’d have really liked to keep them somewhere.

In the end, I had to find a manageable way to follow all blogs, so I spent a couple of hours to move all the blogs I follow to my Google Reader (www.google.com/reader). It’s nice to see all the blogs under one roof, and hopefully I won’t be missing that many posts. For some reason, I seem to have had inexplicable and irrational aversion to using RSS readers. Now I realize how silly of me it had been not to use Google Reader or Bloglines or some other well-designed RSS reader. Better late than never, I suppose.