her real world

An ode to Google Reader

I was on a conference call this week and was confronted by the question: well who reads blogs anyways? Or something like that. I’m not too worried about getting the quote exactly right, since I’m pretty sure the person who said it won’t be reading this here blog.

But it got me to thinking. Who reads blogs?

I sure do. I read them constantly. Along with my email, Twitter and facebook, Google Reader is one of my main internet hangouts. To prove how much I heart it, I just finished cleaning out my subscription list so that I could give you a grand total of the number of feeds I follow daily.

Ready for it?

194.

In my conference call I said 200, but I wasn’t far off. And when I said it? Shocked silence.

And then something along the lines of: But how?

My answer: Google Reader. I won’t read a blog if they don’t have a feed. Cause if they don’t have a feed, I can’t follow them in Google Reader. I don’t have a list of bookmarked websites that I go to every day to see if they have new content.

I wake up to 1000+ posts from 194 blogs and I read them all from Google Reader.

Now, before you fall off your chair and then wake up and then ask me how I could possibly read 1000+ posts a day and still keep my job, let me explain something. I use the term “read” loosely.

There are some posts that I read in their entirety. Anything from the “people I know” or “people I don’t know” category is read, as they are actual people whose lives I follow from my corner of the blogosphere. I also “read” all of my webcomics (22 in total, not all are updated daily).

I browse all of the home blogs/craft blogs/design blogs quickly, scanning to see if any of the pictures catch my eye. Basically if your blog doesn’t have photos or you clip them or the text out to make me click through so I can pad the stats on your site, I don’t go. I mark any of the ideas I like either ‘design ideas’ or ‘crafting inspiration’ and move on.

On to food blogs. I browse Tastespotting constantly, it’s super easy as it’s just photo after photo after photo of food porn. Sometimes I’ll tag the posts for my recipe file without even reading the recipe, sometimes I click through to get more details. I follow a number of food blogs and I savour those posts the most, I’ll read all of them regardless of whether or not they make me click through or not because I don’t subscribe to any food blog that I’m not in love with.

I browse my “Toronto” blogs quite often as I like to keep up to speed on one of my most favourite places on earth. I also keep super up to date on my public service renewal type friends because they are oh so witty and wonderful.

If I’m having a slow brain day I’ll flip through my photo blogs/art blogs and the Flickr streams that I subscribe to for inspiration and a kick start.

Ummm. Oh then come my “culture” and “life” blogs. Now, I really don’t know how I choose blogs to go into either of these categories other than “culture” blogs tend to have something to do with societies or a society at large and “life” has to do with everything else. Basically the “life” category is the general category that I don’t use because I hate general categories.

I think that’s pretty much it. There are a few others that I kind of keep up with, but they aren’t updated often so I don’t really count them as part of my daily reads. So yeah.

Part of the reason I’m sharing this with you is because I’m going to start writing more about the things I read about, in hopes that I can start a dialogue here and get you all (and by you all I mean my millions of readers) exposed to some new things to read.

Oh and of course, get you on Google Reader to read them. Cause really….how else are you going to keep up!

*tap tap tap* Is this thing on?

Okay, so.

Yeah, I know.

It’s been a long time folks. Let’s just say I’ve been busy. Crazy in love and super happy and loving my job and losing weight and energized and…happy. You can see from above that I am certainly wearing purple and smiling a lot and enjoying the big fish tank at the Toronto Zoo.

I think about blogging every day. My “inspirations” folders (both digital and paper) are filled to the brim with things I want to do and things I want to tell you about. The “photos I haven’t uploaded to Flickr” queue is growing by the second and the “photos I have uploaded to Flickr but haven’t titled, geotagged or made public” queue sits there taunting me every time I look at my laptop. I’m telling myself to be patient and I hope you can be patient along with me.

This week marks one year on this domain and I’m happy as a pig in poop about that. I’ve finally found an internet place where I like to roost, and it has been a long time coming. My first blog post was on livejournal in 2003 and that was the beginning of a long journey of flitting and fluttering about trying to find my way.

Things you can start getting excited about:

• The launch of my new ‘corporate look’, I’m working with a faboo designer (@kevgel)
• A thousand bajillion photos of delicious food that I can’t wait to share
• The story of a journey I’m about to take, working title “Why I’m putting a king sized bed in a bachelor apartment”
• My very nascent thoughts on the social web and how I’m bringing it to work. Yes, you did hear me just say one of the things I don’t talk about on my blog. But we’re going to be refining the rules!
• A new idea I have for sharing photos, not sure if it’s going to work
• Me showing you how artsy and crafty I have been in the last few months
• Many, many photos and stories about Toronto
• A few ploys on getting a bit more interactivity on this here blog

Have I wet your whistle?

Until then, follow me @herrealworld

My head is in a million different places at once

I don’t know how explicitly I’ve said this before, but there are two things I don’t talk about on my blog.

The first is work. You may know that I do policy work for the Government of Canada. If you are resourceful, you can find out more details. If you are not, then just know that I do policy work for the Government of Canada. I don’t talk about it. The end.

The second is my personal life. This would be more difficult if I actually had one at the moment, but I can assure you that if I did I’d most likely cheer about the fact that (cover your ears mother) I was getting to have relations on a regular basis and that’s about it. Chances are I’d blog even less than I already do if this were the case.  Really if you could choose to blog OR have relations and the choice would be to blog, I’m sorry we can no longer be friends.

This doesn’t mean I can’t talk about the effects of either of these on my life. For instance, because of #1 I don’t even have time to shower regularily (kind of kidding) let alone make daily photo posts or even schedule daily photo posts so it at least looks like I have time to blog every day. Not having a #2 makes me cranky as the replacement for not having #2 is chocolate and booze, and really that makes me fat. I digress.

The one downside to having my shit figured out is the fact that I’ve come to the realization that there is so much stuff that I want to do I can’t even get it all organized. My iPhone is helping, but I’m finding there are not enough hours in the day to even daydream about the stuff I want to do, let alone actually doing it. I’m thinking it’s about time that I polish off my old personal logic model and try and map some stuff out, but between planning my personal finances and my retirement plans and my crafting projects and my home decoration fantasies and my cooking adventures and my photography projects and the progress on my morph and the countless other things I can’t remember to list off right now I’m pretty exhausted. My house needs vacuuming and my floors need washing and I have new picture frames from IKEA that I need to get filled and I have baking that I want to do and swimming that I can’t do because of the goddamn bus strike and mother nature are conspiring against my efforts to make it to and from the pool and not turn into a Melsicle.  This paragraph is getting too long.

New paragraph. My cats come to me immediatly if I open any sort of a bag that sounds like a bag of cat treats. For instance you know those dark chocolate covered almonds I love? Yeah, you can get organic ones from Shoppers. I opened that bag maybe once this evening and every time…err…I mean that one time, the cats came running like raging fangirls. I certainly only opened the bag once.

New paragraph.

At the moment I have at the very least three crafting projects in progress. That doesn’t count the million that I have in my head. I’m trying to take photos every day, but I want to take more than that so it’s hard to live up to the unrealistic expectation that I can actually do that. And I want to start drawing at least one webcomic. That’s doable right?

On the morph front, I’m not gaining (in fact I lost over Christmas), but I’m not losing very fast either. It would help if I could get to the pool, because that’s the exercise that I really like to do. I miss the pool. I plan on getting a car. I also need to get out and be more social because I’m two for two the last two times I went out. Grocery store + cute boy = flirting and almost enough courage to ask him for his number. IKEA + cute artist boy = courage enough to ask him for his business card. He didn’t have any printed yet, but he told me about his show. Sadly I did not press further. Happily having my shit together means that this isn’t the end of the world.

Have I updated you enough yet?

I’ve got plans for the blog, but not the time to realize them. Stay tuned for a ramped up design, a section devoted to photography, an attempt to make this place more interactive, and more content. But while I have a huge deadline looming for the thing I don’t talk about #1, don’t expect any of it anytime soon. But know that I love you. All of you. And by you I mean the millions of adoring readers.