With Blaugust 2019 well under way I had the pleasure of adding a lot of blogs to my Feedly, which is the medium I use to read blogs. Since I work fulltime and have a bit of travel time I prefer to read stuff on Feedly as I travel to and from work. It’s a nice reader, I can easily add (and delete) feeds from it and because it’s cross platform I can read on my PC, my phone and my tablet without issues. I love that it works that way and I don’t really see how I used to read blogs without the help of a feed app.
Of course a feed reader like this has it’s downsides. It’s literally a reader only, so if I want to comment on someone’s blogpost I will have to actively go to their website and comment. One of the other downsides is that for some people’s blog I don’t get full posts on Feedly but only an excerpt with a redirection to their website to read any further. Because of the way that I’m using Feedly, namely to just catch up on blogs during some downtime, I remove those blogs when I come across them. I know it sounds a bit harsh but unless I see a really compelling reason to constantly open a blog seperately to read it I just don’t put in the effort. Especially with so many people posting due to Blaugust right now it’s just a step that I’m not willing to take.
As for the rest. I consider myself to be mostly a blog lurker. I enjoy reading what other people are up to and have a few blogs that I’ve been following for years now and that are big examples to my own blogging. Tales of the Aggronaut, Bio Break, Aywren Sojourner and Contains Moderate Peril are a few of them on that list. Although I’m not always interested in the specific topics they write about, I don’t play most of the games the reference on their blogs for example, I do always enjoy reading every blog post they put out. They are able to make things interesting even for people who have no clue what the game entails. I like their writing personas and I have a huge respect for all of them because they’ve just been around for so long. I mean I’ve been blogging for a good chunk of time myself, my archives here date back to 2013 but I’ve been blogging for longer than that, but I still don’t think I’m anywhere near their level. I feel like my writing persona is all over the place and I use my blog more as a sort of diary than anything else.
Anyway. I do enjoy having added all these new blogs to my daily reading routine. It is a bit overwhelming to keep up with all of them but I’m trying my best to do so. Now I just need to nudge myself into the comment game and interact a bit more with my fellow bloggers instead of being the lurker that I have been over the past years.
I feel much the same way, but I’d be a lot happier if Blaugust was in the winter months because I only have non-bike commute time there 😛 I read a lot more blog posts during that time than in the summer.
Well there is Blogmas, or so I’ve been told!
Thank you for your kind words. I always try to remember not to assume that people know about what I’m writing. Therefore, if I reference an MMO in a post, I write the title out in full in the first paragraph, then use the acronym for the rest. If a system or game mechanic is similar to that of another, then reference them and draw attention to the parallels. Often ideas and discussions that are relevant to one game can be equally applied to another. Hence a LOTRO post can potentially be of interest to the WoW, GW2 or ESO player.
You mentioned considering your own blog as a diary. I think these can be very useful in cataloguing your relationship with a game as you progress. I also lurk a lot when it comes to reading other peoples work. I have over 100 game blogs listed in Feedly and I try my best to see what everyone’s writing about.
Also, there are games I read about regularly, despite never having played them. EVE Online and in particular, Wilhelm Arcturus’s coverage, is the greatest game I’ve never played. But I like his spin on things.
It’s one of the reasons why your blog is one of my examples. Next to it being well written you really do make me feel like I’m part of a game, even when I’m not playing it. Even if I don’t ahve the time to pick them up myself I really enjoy your dissections of LotrO and STO.
I use Feedly but I never read posts inside it. I mean I have literally never done that even once. It never occured to me that anyone would! I just use it to let me know when a blog has a new post up and I click through to open the blog itself. I can’t imagine how poor most blogs I read, and my own as well, must look if all you see is the Feedly verson. It must be like reading a samizdat copy!
Well Feedly shows text and images which is usually all that’s needed really 🙂 I like that everything is homogenous on there since some themes/layouts and fonts can be pretty hard on the eyes. Hence me defaulting to Feedly. As mentioned when I want to comment on a post I will click through to the actual blog page but otherwise I stick to the reader.
I like how clean Feedly makes posts on mobile where I do most of my reading. When I’m on my PC I’ll go to the actual sites. Not a fan of the way Feedly looks on PC.