Comments (39)

By kilax, December 18, 2009 5:35 am

How do you find new blogs to read and what makes you subscribe to a blog? Or is your feed reader maxed out with “no vacancies”?

I love having a lot of blogs to read. I spend 2.5+ hours on the train on weekdays and it keeps me entertained.

And I feel like I have been finding a lot of great ones lately! My method on finding new blogs is by reading the comments on the other blogs I subscribe to (when I have time or the topic is really something I want to see what people are saying about)… if someone is saying something I can relate to, I go check out their blog. And often, when I am there, I may find links to other blogs I may enjoy. Sometimes, I can’t even remember how I ended up at a blog in the first place!

The first thing I do when I go to a new blog is check out their “About” page. Then I usually check out their writing style and see if the topics they talk about interest me. If they do, I put their blog in a “TBD” folder in my reader to check out for awhile and see if enjoy their blog.

Of course, from time to time, I get new commenters, and I always go check out their blog as well, and often, I end up subscribing.

I go through phases where I am looking for new blogs to read, just for fun, and then I go through phases where I cannot stay caught up with reader, and am not looking at all. And of course, I continually purge – I unsubscribe to those that ended up not suiting my taste. If I didn’t do that, I would get way too overwhelmed. Reading blogs is supposed to be fun, after all!

I have been continually updating my blogroll, and may move it to its own page at some point in time. I’ll keep you posted. (Does anyone else look at blogrolls besides me?)

Comments (20)

By kilax, September 22, 2009 5:55 pm

My mom and dad both sent me separate emails asking what was going on (after reading my last post). Nothing! Oops. So I did exactly what I try not to do by writing that – make someone think I am withholding info. I’m not. Especially from them! Ha! I call them and blabber blabber blabber away.*

Thank you for your awesome comments. That was one of those posts where I thought, “hmm, maybe I shouldn’t have written that.” But I’d had it on my mind for about a year, and wanted to let it out. It’s older info. But sometimes, when I am trying to fall asleep at night, all of these thoughts fill my head and I have to get them out. So, here it comes, another weird thought:

Do you ever quit reading a blog because you feel like it’s bad for you?

A while ago, I subscribed to A LOT of health (i.e. “weight loss”) blogs. Some of them just contained news tidbits, but a lot of them were personal blogs of people struggling with weight loss. I was very much in the same boat (Ha! You probably remember those posts.) so I enjoyed reading them because I related so much.

But after awhile, especially when I focused more on running, I felt like some of the blogs became toxic to me. Reading someone’s constant, daily struggles with weight made me feel really weird. It made me feel bad. It was almost like I was feeling their daily anguish and frustration and disappointment, and it just made me feel… hopeless. It was strange. I had to put all of those blogs in a special folder in my google reader, and for now, I just mark them as “read” everyday until I am ready to look at them again.

It’s like they wore me out. It was too much of the same old thing. Which is ironic, because I get on those kicks all the time – health, bowling, running, travel… I talk in patterns. I think we all do a bit.

So I was just wondering if anyone else has had this happen. I’ve definitely stopped reading other blogs because I didn’t enjoy their style (which of course, is personal preference, and subjective), but this… was something different.

*oh, thanks for listening about my dentist bill, dad. I got it straightened away. They are covering the entire expense now.