Reading blogs

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.