Blogging advice

Okay, since my father and several friends have recently entered the world of blogging, I feel like I have a responsiblity to educate or at least advise my readers about the dangers of blogging.

I have, in my life, struggled with a blog-reading addiction.

I think part of it comes from the information addiction which surfaced when I had a job reading 7 newspapers a week for the State Rep I worked for....I was supposed to know about every pancake breakfast, every 50th Wedding Anniversary, and and every Chili Supper in the district.

Anyway, let's just admit that one can waste alot of time checking to see if people have updated their blogs. I mean ridiculous amounts of time.

So, let me pass along a handy little website called www.bloglines.com

There are several like it, but Bloglines allows you to subscribe to blogs, and they notify you when a new blog is posted by one of your favorite bloggers. So instead of checking 17 times a day to see if they've written anything new, you can just check your subscription, and it will list all of the new entries for you.

Now, not all blogs will have subscription feeds (these are things like RSS and Atom, which I really don't understand), so it doesn't always work. For instance, I can't subscribe to my friend John Wentz's blog for some reason, so I still check it several times a week for updates....but most of the others notify me automatically.

Someone with more computer knowledge can explain it much better, but I'm just saying that I don't want to be a part of you getting fired for spending 3.5 hours/day checking blogs at work.