Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Blogger Is Messing With My Routine

As I mentioned before, it always takes me a very long time to become fully functional after I wake up. This is why, for example, I always get up at 6 am (in spite of being the opposite of a morning person) whenever I have to teach at 9:30. I have a routine all worked out that helps me get into a fully awake mode. I get up, have a cup of coffee, scroll down my blogroll to see what people have been blogging about. When I find a post title that sounds interesting, I follow the link, read it and often comment. (This is why people who don't give titles to their posts don't get many visits from me.)

For the last two days, though, Blogger has been acting up. I think that some changes are being introduced to it, and this always messes with Blogger's functionality. As a result, it's been informing me that my blogroll is empty and suggesting that I add some blogs that I'd like to follow. So now I have to use Google Reader to access the 235 blogs I follow. I don't like Google Reader much because many people place their entire (often extremely lengthy) posts in there instead of hiding everything but the first paragraph under the break. I'm sure they don't mean to be annoying and just simply don't know that this is something that needs to be done. 

I just hope that Blogger goes back to normal soon. If you use Blogger, are you experiencing the same issues with the blogs you follow?

8 comments:

sarcozona said...

I think it's really annoying when people only include partial posts in their feed - I hate having to actually go to a blog to read their posts! You can also get Google Reader to show you just the titles by choosing "List" instead of "Expanded" in the upper right.

Clarissa said...

Oh, I had no idea. Thank you! This really helps.

Amanda said...

I used to have my posts truncated in google reader, but multiple friends of mine complained. They didn't want to open it in a new window, they wanted to minimize tabs, etc etc. So now I put the whole post in.

Melissa said...

I second that Sarcozona. I use Google Reader to read blogs, and especially on my phone, I prefer to not have to waste literally minutes or data plan to read a post. I read more fully those blogs that appear in their entirety. I actually had no idea that bloggers could choose how to do this, I just assumed that there was something I could do to change it if and when I had the time to investigate. It's been a couple of years, and I have yet to investigate, so good to know this.

Clarissa, I will still read your blog of course if it's not all on Reader, but for what it's worth, I would prefer that it be there.

Clarissa said...

I don't know, guys, I even thought that it might be a good idea to hide the bulk of the longer posts under a break on the blog's homepage. If there are reviews or especially long posts that some people find to be boring, I thought it might make sense to hide them so that only those who are specifically interested in the topic would be exposed to them. Then, the homepage will be less busy and there will be more posts on it.

What does everybody think?

Melissa: Thank you! I just now learned that you can read in Google Reader on a cell phone. Since I never use it myself, I had no idea that it was possible.

Clarissa said...

Oh my God, my posts do look horrible in Google Reader!!! I never even thought to look before.

I need to change it now.

Anonymous said...

I've never used Google Read, and don't have any idea how my posts look. Guess I should find out.

-Mike

Clarissa said...

Yours come up complete and look great. :-)