Or: Aaaaaaaaaah, How Do I Keep Track?
Stress, by Abie Sudiono. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
I haven’t come up with a good organizational system to keep updated on the blogs I follow yet. Not that I’m the most organized person on the planet – see last week’s post for the messy system I came up with to keep my notes for my novel straight. But it seems like there’s a million different ways to keep up with people’s blogs, and none of them work quite as well as I’d like them to.
The easiest method is with WordPress (the blogging platform I use, in case you didn’t know). If you have a WordPress account, you can just click on the little “subscribe” button at the top of the blogs you find interesting. Of course, this means you have to be signed in to WordPress to read your subscriptions, but I usually catch up with them before or after I make a post myself. The downside is this only works for WordPress blogs. Blogger, Tumblr, etc. you have to find another method for.
The other tool I use is Google Reader. If you have a Google account (for Gmail, GoogleDocs, etc.) you can get into Google Reader and type in the web addresses of the blogs you want to follow. The handy thing is you can organize blogs into folders according to topic or whatever you want, which is what I’ve down. My problem is I’ve got lots of blogs on here, and I forget to check this (mainly because I have to sign in to check it). As a result, my Google Reader currently says I have 500 or so updates to read, which I’m never going to catch up on. Also, if I read a blog without going through Google Reader first, it says that update is still unread, even though I’ve read it.
Another method is through email updates. There are only a couple blogs that I follow this way, mainly because I don’t really want to clutter up my inbox. If I get really lazy, I sometimes use my browser to bookmark blogs, because I don’t have to sign in to do this. Unfortunately, bookmarks don’t tell you about updates. And they’re not there if you happen to use a different computer.
The last way I keep up is to click on the person’s name every time they comment on Stories and Stuff, just to see if they’ve updated since I checked last. Sometimes it’s a good reminder, because I realize somehow I’d lost track of one of the blogs I’m interested in.
As a result, I often read blogs in batches, catching up on the last five posts someone wrote all at the same time. So if you’re wondering why sometimes I have five comments all at once, when I haven’t dropped by for a little while, just blame it on my disorganized system of staying updated.
What about you? What methods to you use to stay up-to-date, and how well do they work?
Hmm... 