Blogilation

EDIT: I have finally figured out how to show it all up as links!

Here’s a mixed-tape-type-love-ya-lots compilation of my google reader subscriptions (I explain this at the bottom of the post). Not that most of you will care or anything, but I realised I don’t have everything on my blogroll because, well…if you click on the list pic below you’ll understand.

click to enlarge

The red section comprises the design, fashion and lifestyle stuff I follow, the green section is the politics, the yellow section is all about food. The order doesn’t reflect my priorities or anything, and some of the blogs are new, and I also haven’t put some of the stuff on my blogroll on my reader because I’m lazy, but you get the idea. Also some of them don’t have pictures in the feeds, but  meh. I usually just use it as a reminder that the site has updated.

Anyway, in some ways this is a tribute and thank you to all the blogs I follow for being dedicated to what they do. I really do love many, many of the writers an unhealthy amount for sharing their successes (and failures) in the kitchen, important perspectives on issues I would otherwise not hear about, and gorgeous images to keep my photographic insides alive. I feel incredibly lucky to be so privileged to be able to drink in so much of the world through the pixels on my laptop and the passion of a great many creative individuals. Yay for blogs!

And now…I hope I have assisted you in your never-ending journey of procrastination :)

Google reader, for those of you who don’t know, lets you “subscribe” to blogs you like, and lists them all so they’re easily accessible. Most usefully, it lets you know when websites have updated (these are in bold) and how many new posts there are (no. of posts in brackets). This is easier than having them all in bookmarks for several reasons:

1. If you know you want to do some blog reading, everything is in one place, and can be all in one tab. When you click on the title of the blog you want to read, it opens to the right, but the list of subscriptions is still always on the left.
2. When you click on a blog name in your subscriptions list, you don’t have to load any of the ads or graphics of the blog, only the content posts. This saves considerable time.
3. You can instantly see which blogs have updated at a glance, rather than having to go to the blog, download it all, and realise there’s nothing news.
4. You can discover new, similar blogs by clicking on the little arrow that pops up when you hover over a subscription name and hovering over “More like this.” Unlike looking at recommendations from generic blogging websites, google compares the blog to ones from various blogging platforms.
5. You can “like” a post. WordPress lets you do that now as well, but I think it was a cool feature to have on Google Reader.
6. You can still see the number of comments for most blogs, share the post with others, email, and “star” it if you wanted to for future reference. This is especially helpful if you blog yourself. It’s also consistently laid out, which makes reading a breeze

There are a few sacrifices though, in that some blogs don’t share all the content (ie. just the titles of the blog posts), and sometimes I do miss being welcomed by an attractive blog banner that has become iconic and familiar, or feeling at home in a space someone has carefully and tastefully set up. But you can always easily still go to the blog itself through Google reader if you want that experience.

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