Blogs have a way of taking over one’s life–filling every spare moment unless one takes deliberate steps to control them.
This is true of the writing of blogs–of which there is no end–but it is even more true of the reading of blogs.
There are hundreds of absolutely amazing blogs out there–from those that update multiple times a day to those that update only a few times a year.
RSS makes things easier by allowing one to only visit those blogs that have been updated recently.
I have had moderate success using Firefox’s “Live Bookmarks” to manage my blog reading. All the blogs I follow are organized into a folder, with subfolders for each “category” of reading. I have the “Bloggers I know”, the “Book Bloggers”, the “Mommy Bloggers”, the “Thinking Bloggers”, the “Political Bloggers”, etc. By categorizing them this way, I can avoid certain classes on certain days (for example, I don’t read politics on the weekends–it’s just a personal rule.)
This hasn’t been a bad system, per se–but it hasn’t been a spectacular system.
The problem is that I had almost 100 blogs that I was following regularly–and I simply didn’t have enough hours in the day to read them all. Still, I was trying to read every word of every post as soon as it came out.
I tried to impose control by only checking blogs once a day.
But even this was insufficient. There were so many blogs that even checking them just once a day meant that I was spending hours reading every day.
I don’t have that kind of time.
So now, I’m trying something new. I kept my thirty(!) favorite blogs in my blog feeds folder on Firefox. I divided another sixty between the five weekdays (12 per day) and added them to a nifty little Firefox Add-on called Morning Coffee. Morning Coffee allows me to press a little coffee cup icon (
The plan is that I’ll read my thirty as normal and load my “morning coffee” blogs. I’ll skim what’s been written on the morning coffee blogs over the past week, reading in depth only what really sparks my interest. In doing so, I should (my fingers are crossed) be able to reduce my blog reading time somewhat.
An extra sixty or so blogs that I’ve bookmarked at some time or another are now kept in a subfolder at the bottom of the “blog feeds” folder. I can peruse these at a leisurely pace during the weekends when I don’t have any “morning coffee” blogs and don’t read any of the political or “news” related sites.
At least, that’s the plan.
Do you ever struggle with spending too much time online? How do you keep your blog-reading under control?
Welllll…my parents have yet to get high-speed internet at their house, so my online time is basically limited to the times I can get WIFI somewhere…so that provides a limit to my browsing time. Ha.
Oh my goodness, this is a great topic. Since I am a writer by trade (trained journalist), my computer time is also supposed to be spend doing my paid writing. I will often procrastinate through it and spend time blogging, visiting, commenting, etc.!
I have Firefox and didn’t know about the add ons you mentioned. I may have to look into those and hope it saves me some time. One thing that has helped a little is my favorites are in my Yahoo thingy and it’s my home page so I start off reading the ones I love and then try to get to the others.
I check the blogs I read M-F, before getting started at work (or during the day, whenever there is downtime). Since I am on the computer so much for work, I try not to be on it too much on the weekends – pretty easy to do, since my weekends are usually so full. I sometimes have projects that I need to work on at home, and that requires some extra computer-time, but I don’t read as many blogs as you do. I read the blogs on my blog-roll, and that’s just about it.
Oh my goodness, I feel your pain! It is so hard to limit my online time but, at the same time, stay caught up with the bloggers that I feel like I really “know” and have more than a passing acquaintance with.
My *plan* is to divide the blogs I follow into 7 folders on Google Reader, according to days of the week…and then only look at that blog on whichever day I’m supposed to. It hasn’t really worked yet. :)