{"id":2925,"date":"2010-05-26T11:39:55","date_gmt":"2010-05-26T16:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/?p=2925"},"modified":"2010-05-26T11:39:55","modified_gmt":"2010-05-26T16:39:55","slug":"managing-my-blog-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/2010\/20100526-2925.htm","title":{"rendered":"Managing my blog reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blogs have a way of taking over one’s life<\/strong>–filling every spare moment unless one takes deliberate steps to control them.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

RSS makes things easier by allowing one to only visit those blogs that have been updated recently.<\/p>\n

I have had moderate success<\/strong> 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.)<\/p>\n

This hasn’t been a bad system, per se–but it hasn’t been a spectacular system. <\/p>\n

The problem is that I had almost 100 blogs that I was following regularly<\/strong>–and I simply didn’t have enough hours in the day to read them all. Still, I was trying to read every<\/i> word of every<\/i> post as soon as it came out.<\/p>\n

I tried to impose control by only checking blogs once a day.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I don’t have that kind of time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a>. Morning Coffee allows me to press a little coffee cup icon (\"Morning) on my toolbar and load the twelve preselected blogs for the day. <\/p>\n

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<\/i> what really sparks my interest. In doing so, I should<\/i> (my fingers are crossed) be able to reduce my blog reading time somewhat.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

At least, that’s the plan.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Do you ever struggle with spending too much time online? How do<\/i> you keep your blog-reading under control?<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more Managing my blog reading<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2925"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2925\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}