I did something on Friday I haven't done in a long time. I checked out my blog list in my Blogger dashboard. Actually, I'm not sure I've ever really checked it.
It was a pretty long list. Apparently at one time I was rather fond of clicking the "follow" button on blogs and then forgetting all about them. Actually, that's not true. I would follow and then bookmark them, and if they didn't post anything interesting is say six months I'd just delete the bookmark without un-following the blog.
Anyway. It was a great way to
I actually had a couple of reasons for doing this. One was because I felt bad about all those people whom I called friends, yet never went to their blogs. The other, and more important reason, was to check out how other authors set up their blogs. As you can see, I've made a few changes already and there may (or may not) be more to come.
I have a bad habit of bookmarking sites - blogs, articles, interesting things I fully intend to go back to read but never do . . . This results in a favorites list that scrolls down for miles.
Every once in a while I'll remember something particularly helpful that I bookmarked and I'll open up my favourites and, you guessed it, I'll be unable to find it. So then I'll spend several hours organizing my list into folders with pithy names like: cool stuff; useful info; cool info; miscellaneous stuff; et cetera, et cetera. And then I'll go back to bookmarking stuff willy nilly without putting them in a designated folder and again my favourites list will be of epic proportions.
And every once in a while I'll start checking out some of these bookmarked sites with the idea of taming the ever expanding list, and a lot of the time I'll be scratching my head wondering why I bookmarked this site or that article in the first place. And sometimes I'll go to a site and it's no longer even there.
Now you may be wondering what this all has to do with the price of tea in China, and I have to admit, not much really. I just felt like sharing. But I am going to try to make an effort to start visiting the bookmarked sites of people I know more often, and maybe even leave a comment once in awhile. I seem to make this resolution once a year or so. I always start out strong but then peter out within a few weeks.
Bookmarking sites, for me, is like downloading free books. Amazon has hundreds of free books available. Poor George (my Kindle) is just bursting with books - over 1300 UNREAD free books. At first I was downloading everything that had a free sticker attached, didn't matter what genre, whether it was self-published or traditional, if it was free, I downloaded it. But then it started to get harder to scroll through the titles on George and I realized that I had no idea what most of these books were about. So I'd start to read something that had a catchy title, and a few pages in I'd wonder "What was I thinking?" when I downloaded that book.
So then I had the bright idea of organizing the books on George, so I created some wonderful folders labeled with different genres. And it would have been a great time saver - if I'd thought of doing it before I started downloading all those free books. Who wants to move 1300 books into appropriate folders? And to get the book into the right folder, you either have to open it and read enough to figure out what genre it is, or look it up on the internet. Seriously?
I'd like to say I've learned to be a little more discriminating when it comes to books, but who am I kidding? It's like bookmarking a web site - I'm sure I have a very good reason for it!
Apparently I have no self control when it comes to favourites or freebies.
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