Time to jump ship

The time has come folks!

The Google Reader cut off date (1st July) is almost upon us and if you haven't made alternative blog reading plans already, then you really do need to do it by the end of the month.

So how do you make sure you don't miss out on all my fabulous posts in future?

Use the subscriptions links in my sidebar or at the bottom of every post...



If you'd like more help and information on exactly how to go about subscribing, click here.


So what is this subscribing business anyway?

I know some of you were, and possibly still are, a little baffled by all this talk about the demise of Google Reader.  Well, let me try to explain a little...

Basically it is a way of keeping track of all your favourite blogs and websites without having to go to all the trouble of visiting each one every 5 minutes to see if there's been anything new posted.

To make life easier for yourself you can join up to websites, or maybe have an app on your phone, which will 'collect' all the latest blog posts from your favourite blogs for you and keep them for you to read.  These sites/apps are called Readers or RSS Aggregators or News Readers, some popular ones are 'Google Reader', 'Feedly' and 'Bloglovin''.


Oh, you mean like my Blogger Reading List?

Well, sort of.  Some of you will use Blogger Reading List or Google Friends Connect to do this job for you, which is ok for reading Blogger blogs.  The only problem is that it won't let you add any blogs to your list that are hosted on any other platforms or sites.

If you use a  dedicated site/app to do the job you can also keep up with blogs on Typepad, Wordpress, Square Space, or anywhere else for that matter.


Great, so what's all this Google Reader hoo-ha about then?

Well, one of those Readers that I mentioned above, 'Google Reader' is going to disappear very soon, in fact as of the 1st July 2013 it will no longer exist   So if you read your blog posts on Goggle Reader, then you need to change to a different app/website in order to keep following the blogs you love.


Blimey, I use Google Reader and I don't want to miss out...

... no problem.  Just click here to find out more about how to keep receiving posts.


I use the Blogger Reading List and Google Friends connect to read my blogs, what do I do?

It might be the case that blogs you like (and probably clicked 'follow' on the Goggle Friends Connect box on their blog) just come up in your 'Reading List', every time you log into Blogger?

If that's the case, you don't need to panic just yet, nothing will change for you at the moment.

But a little word of warning - it might be going soon too.  There's been no confirmation of this yet, but the people who know about these things seem to think that Google are very likely to axe Google Friends Connect in order to promote the use of Google+ instead, so it might not be a bad idea to make alternative arrangements anyway...


I hope this all makes sense, but if you have any questions, let me know in your comments





S x





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Comments

  1. As you mentioned I just log in to my Blogger dashboard and use my reading list, but I do get updates from non Blogger blogs in the list. Everything that I follow is shown there. I have been resisting using a feeder because my reasoning is that for the time being it is completely unnecessary.
    xXx Helen

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  2. Yes don't they just seem to be 'encouraging' us? I did think it was supposed to be better than Facebook in that respect, that you were able to keep things private a lot more easily? Mind you, I don't really know much about how to use either of them to be honest.
    Sandra x

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  3. That's interesting to know Helen. I guess it lets you keep anything other blogs that you'd already subscribed to, which is good news. But I'm assuming that it won't let you add any blogs from other platforms any more. Is that right? I don't use it myself, so I don't have any first-hand information, just what I've read...
    Sandra x

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