I figure I’m extremely overdue for my biannual post griping about this issue, probably because I have been so behind in catching up with most of the blogs I try to read regularly, I haven’t been using my feed reader much and have been mostly spot-checking off my blogroll here, daily or weekly or so catching up with the blogs I just won’t miss.

But now, after finally having gotten my feed reader un-backed up and at a manageable level of posts to deal with again, I’m ready to bitch about it again. I’ve been threatening to do this for probably a year and a half now, but this time I’m serious.

If you are one of those bloggers that only publishes a “preview” feed of your posts and doesn’t publish your full feed, I’m deleting you from my feed reader. I don’t care if you’re my best friend or my mother, you’re getting axed sometime within the next couple of weeks or so.

Fortunately most of the blogfolks I know well and read regularly don’t have this annoying habit (and neither my best friend nor my mom really blog), so there’s really not that many on the soon-to-be-deleted list. Unfortunately there’s a few bloggers I’ve been reading for years (who likely don’t read my blog anyway so, I know, what’s the point, right?) that ARE on that short list, but I’m so sick of it I don’t care anymore. There are some regional bloggers on that short list too, though - not many, but a few.

When it comes to dealing with other blogs, there’s nothing that drives me more insane than trying to efficiently catch up with (and stay on top of) my regular blogreading than coming back across those feeds that only publish a preview and you have to go to the blog site itself to actually read the post, so I’m just not dealing with it anymore.

The more time that’s gotten consumed dealing with the blogosphere in general, the more I’ve tried to get my reading and participation down to a manageable level where it’s not going to take me fifty billion hours every day to stay caught up and top of things, so if I have to delete blogs that I normally read every single day or almost and have for years because they refuse to publish their feed in full, so be it.

The way I look at it, if I’ve taken the time and made the effort to subscribe to your feed because I’m interested in what you write, I should be able to do so with my feed reader if I want, instead of you throwing a bone instead of your full feed and making me have to take a bunch of extra steps to actually get to read all of what you wrote beyond a few sentences.

I suppose the factor of being able to see there’s been an update is a pro of subscribing, but honestly there’s just not much point to me in subscribing to your feed if I have to go to your blog anyway to actually get to READ your posts, so from now on, I just won’t. My time is taken up enough by blog reading to have to be dealing with extra steps in the process.

If your reasons for insisting people come directly to your blog to read are because of advertising and you run Google ads, Feedburner has a Google AdSense option that can be included in your feed. Use it. Hell, I’ll be happy to click on ads from time to time in a feed if you’d just publish your full damn feed.

If your reasons for insisting people come directly to your blog to read are because you are overly attached to your SiteMeter or other stat counter and like to suss out the mysteries of who is reading your blog on the off chance that seeing a particular city in your details means so-and-so’s been reading your blog… then you need a new hobby.

I really do mean no offense, but I’m just sick of it. There was a backlog of something like 65,000 posts in my feed reader - which gives you a good idea of how long I’d been ignoring it - and every time I clicked on one of those blogs that doesn’t publish posts in their entirety, my blood pressure shot up just a little bit more. I almost deleted them all right then, but figured I’d wait a week or two just on the off chance that some might run across this and realize hey, maybe not publishing my full feed is a bad idea after all.

I won’t be deleting any of them that are on there from my blogroll, but since I’ve gotten my feed reader caught up again, I likely won’t be tagging the blogroll much for my own personal reading purposes, so.

So there it is. With the exception of Sarcastro’s kid blog (which I suspect may be an oversight anyway), if you don’t publish your full feed, your days are numbered in my feed reader. Like anyone cares, I know, but it makes me feel better to have vented about it anyway. Grrrr.

On a semi-related note to new news, I guess I’m going to have to quit badmouthing that thing that rhymes with Clogger after all.  I discovered it really HAS improved a great deal since most of us made the mass exodus to WordPress a couple of years ago.

Still could use some tweaking (and damned if they don’t have the SAME templates and NO new ones), but the system itself is really a whole lot better.

I’m not impressed enough to go back, and I still like WordPress much, much better.  But it really has improved, I’ll give it that much.

I wanted to comment today on this post over at Knuck’s because he has a really cool little kid having a birthday today, and the post is a really touching father-to-daughter post even with that special Knuck brand o’ sarcasm (heh), and I just liked it. Having also been an only child and daughter (in this scenario my sister doesn’t count), I dug it (and got just a little bit teary reading it, but don’t tell anybody).

But alas, I have given up all hope of being able to comment on Blogger blogs anymore after months and months of trying and even having consulted with a Blogger/Blogspot expert of sorts, who also eventually gave up trying to figure out why I can no longer comment on blogs on the Blogger platform. When someone who actually was a part of building the damn Blogger platform in the first place can’t even figure it out, I’m sure not going to keep wasting my time trying to.

I love all my Blogger blogging friends, they probably think I don’t care anymore nor read but I do, and I miss being able to comment over at their respective cribs. It figures, and is just my luck, that the majority I would like to comment often on are using Blogger’s regular comment system and not HaloScan or something. Most of these folks I have tried a time or two to get them to convert to WordPress (or ANYTHING besides Blogger) and my powers of persuasion have failed miserably. Or simply, as with some, they just never have had the problems those of us who fled Blogger lo now so many moons ago have had, so they felt no need to move.

Which is okay, really. I still read most of them. I just miss being able to comment at Knuck’s, or Lindsey’s. Or Short & Fat’s. Or Rex L. Camino’s. Or Chez Bez. Or Klinde’s. Or Linda’s. Or Larry Elvis & Curly’s dad’s. Or The Vol Abroad’s. Or Mrs. Bez. Or Dr. Woo’s. Or my out-of-state blog crushes Churlita and Margaret. Or many, many more.

On the upside, the list of folks my powers of persuasion to move to WordPress worked on (or someone else moved indirectly because of it, thanks to some of those) is WAY longer than the Blogger holdouts, as well as the ones who never went to the Dark Side in the first place, so I guess I shouldn’t grouse too much.

No, this post wasn’t meant as a sneaky way of tossing out some link love, I just wanted to bitch about Blogger again ‘cos it sucks. Hee.

On another note - hey, I just noticed I got written up at AnimalShak a couple of weeks ago, sorry it took me so long to notice. I’m not the most observant crayon in the box some days.

Oh hey, remember my Roger Abramson Watch?

He’s baaaaaaaack! I guess I can take it down now (or soon). I know my fellow Rogerettes are thrilled as well!

Unfortunately not on WordPress, but on Blogger (heavy sigh). I still cannot leave comments successfully on any Blogger blogs and haven’t been able to in months (exasperated) - but that’s okay! He’s baaaaaaack!

(And so too recently, I note, is Sean! Woo! Watch me get all excited about politics and current events in 2008 now, this should be fun, huh?!?!!!!) :D

I haven’t been able to post on any Blogger blogs in months, so I’m probably about to adopt the annoying habit of turning my intended comments on peers’ Blogger blogs into posts on my own blog.*

So, my response to Mike over at Chez Bez is: Non-Southerners**. It came from the Times, after all!

Shoot, everyone knows you if meet a new adult person down here, “What do you do for a living?” is going to follow soon on the heels of (if not before):

“Where are you from?”

“Where’d you go to college?”

“Are you married?”

“Do you have children?”

“Where do you go to church?” (in some circles, anyway, and…)

“Can I get you (some ice tea, a beer, a coke, etc.)?”

And some more, of course.  Nosy or not, I expect some of my kinfolk would have sniffed that it’d be considered rude and impolite NOT to answer those questions.  Folks in the South are just that way.***

* (Fortunately this is now a minority as most have moved to WordPress or otherwise, whew.)

** (Nope I didn’t say Yankee… but I could have. Or Midwesterner or West Coaster or whatever, natch.)

*** (Not saying I agree, mind you.)

P.S. Hee.

I think our friend on the West Coast, Magniloquence, put it best recently when she said this:

It’s mostly just… I fell off the internet. I do that.

…which is exactly what happened to me, starting in June after the mega-dustup at Nashville is Talking - which just kinda wore me out, really, my brain was too tired for a while after that to function - but I kept on trying until sometime in July, and even posted once in August. But for the most part, I couldn’t find time and energy to blog, and dropped completely out of the regional Twitter scene, and like Mag said - I just fell off the Internet, for a while. Or at least parts of it.

But I have been reading when I could, and slowly making my way back to the land of the blogliving. I’ve been reading all this time really, when I can and where I can… but the last few weeks things have started falling back into place where I can maybe find at least a little more time to get back to being an active voice in the community, not only regionally but with WordPress stuffs as well, and all that other crap I always inevitably find myself right in the middle of eventually.

One thing I KNOW I’ve got to do if I’m going to start trying to sort of keep up again is trim down the number of blogs in my feed reader, because it just got out of hand. So much good reading out there but just not enough time. I’m going to whack it down to the locals and a scant few others elsewhere I never want to miss, and the rest I’ll just have to live without. The number in my reader had grown to epic proportions, and one just can’t keep up with as many as I was trying to on a daily, or even weekly, basis.

There are some blogs I’ve tried to read almost daily - since I canceled cable some time ago, dinnertime for me is usually blogreading, heh - and I’ve definitely tried to keep up on what was born this summer to try to hold the regional community together, the fabbo Music City Bloggers, since that way I could kind of keep an eye on everyone as a whole at once and got to where I depended on that for my local and regional blog fix. My hat’s off to my friends and colleagues there - you guys truly picked up the torch and ran with it and it’s fantastic.

I still tried to read NIT when I could, but (as we all know) there for a while it seemed to be about everything BUT what Nashville and regional blogs were talking about, so it became a less frequent stop. Though when I dropped by the other day, I was kind of pleased to see that - at least on the surface - it seems to be more like what it always was, and what it should be if it’s going to continue to be called Nashville is Talking.

In the interim of being mostly away, I missed a lot of milestones and a lot of moments I wish I hadn’t… but I was there, it was just that I was reading or behind most of the time, but of course that’s not like actively being there and participating in discussion or leaving notes. For instance, I have had to catch up on my fellow WP fan Jon’s joy at being a first-time new dad in fits and spurts (she’s adorable, Jon and Katie!).

I missed my dear pal Hutchmo’s birthday and didn’t get a moment to wish him and the lovely missus a happy 30th wedding anniversary (Happy Both, my friend!).

There was the recent news of Lintilla’s upcoming surgery (keeping you guys in thoughts and prayers, Slarti).

Ivy’s grandmother passed away, which made me sad (I am so sorry and please forgive me someday for not having read about it until much much later, Ivy).

Brittney is moving to San Francisco and taking the reins of REAL big city blogging out yonder (congratulations and I’m so thrilled for you and you will be fabulously successful, I know!).

The Vol Abroad spotted what I agree (of course!) is a horrendous case of bad parenting.

The aforementioned Magniloquence! In freakin’ Robertson County, ON CASA DE COYOTE LAND… I saw pictures! I am so bummed beyond belief that I missed out on this opportunity to meet her, but I swear I missed any sign at all of it ’til after it was over (’til today, in fact).

I about fell over after my unplanned sabbatical started to find that suddenly, after alllll these months, out of the blue, Rex L. Camino had started posting on his blog again, which makes me giggle.

Not to mention the fact that Smiley has rather questionable underwear fashion sense (I’m sure there’s more evidence of that on The Dry Spot, though), and Short and Fat admits he is evil. Heh.

Then there were of course so many more - and way too many for me to mention EVERYONE - but all the many others I tried to catch up on when I could. I seem to recall some incidents with The Holy Tara and much more over at my Sista’s place, and thrilled that Sista has gone back to school. Many - way too many - interesting occurrences and days of worthwhile reading over at the House of Newscoma in my Northwest Tennessee general homeland area. Other I try so hard not to miss, such as Chez Bez (who now EVERYONE has met BUT me, sigh). Recovering Baptist. Lindsey at Theo/Geo. Sarcastro’s congenial grumbling over at Watching the Defectives. Mrs. Jag, owner of cool dogs. I like reading about Cranky’s amphibian obsession over at SMB.

Our newer friends who arrived shortly before my “vacation” (who also now everyone has met BUT me) such as Klinde and Grace. Grace’s blog really has become my substitute for a Friday night movie when I really have time to sit down and eat a REAL meal for a change sometimes - I catch up on her blog instead of watching a movie or TV or something.

And more from beyond the regional blogosphere that I still try to catch up on when I can, such as Churlita in the Midwest and Margaret down even more South than me. The always charming and hilarious Neil Kramer and his lovely Sophia.

I wish I had time and space to mention everyone by name but there’s just not enough and there are so many more of you than the ones I’ve mentioned. But I have tried to keep up with everyone, or catch up when I can, really I have.

I’ve got to say, though - and it probably just wouldn’t be a Lynnster post about blogs in general without it - damnable Blogger continues to be a thorn in my side, especially through all this attempting to catch up. More than once did I want to leave a comment for some reason or another, yet it’d be a Blogger blog… and nowadays I cannot comment on any of them at all, no matter what I’ve tried to do. WordPress is your friend, people… or at least it certainly is mine and probably many of your readers. Stupid @&%#ing Blogger.

Anyway, I’m back and here, but taking baby steps at this. I don’t have time these days, right now anyway, for memes and all that kind of stuff that can contribute to an incredible amount of time suckage, I really just don’t. But I’m motivated - at least for now - to write again, even if it’s a lot more brief than many of you are used to. Some of the best and funniest blog posts I ever read were just one sentence long, and that might be what you get some days, others it might be more. But I’m at least attempting to be “back”.

By the way, I see new headers and templates all over the place and I adore the new Tiny Cat Pants header, but of course I would (Happy Anniversary to Tiny Cat Pants as well!). Not all that surprising to me, probably one of my favorite bits of blog post of the year comes from our Aunt B. I don’t know why, I just like this and it makes me smile:

I like the smooch where the smoochee is being a little ridiculous about something that makes the smoochee both exasperating and irresistable and the smoocher grabs the smoochie’s shoulders, backs him or her up against a wall, and presses him or herself full up against the smoochee, maybe with a hand on the back of the smoochee’s head, and the smoocher kisses the smoochee like that should end the discussion.

Anyway. I have missed you all, and I wish there were time right now to talk at length and catch up with every single one of you one-on-one, but there are so many of you and I don’t have that much free time still. But I’m here, and have been, and have been reading… and now I’m hopefully posting again. Bear with me while I scrape the rust off my fingers.

So it would appear that someone has pinned down at least part of what’s causing many of us so much frustration when trying to post comments to Blogger blogs:

“You’ll still use your Google account for authentication, so you’ll have a Classic blog (template) that only New Blogger (Google) accounts can leave comments on. This may confuse the viewers.”

Read the entire article here, it seems to explain a lot about Blogger woes of late. I am still reading a lot of these sites with great interest - for one reason, because I thought by now Blogger would have gotten things much more under control, but instead it seems to just be getting more and more whacked out. And more and more seeing some of the major Blogger expert users and the people who were Blogger’s biggest champions during Beta/New getting more and more frustrated. I can’t stop reading this stuff, it’s fascinating. And makes me all the more thankful for WordPress.

Thing is, I don’t think even that above suggestion regarding the Google login is entirely 100% true all the time. Today I was on a Blogger blog that fits that description (at least I’m pretty sure she has switched to New Blogger but is using the old template) and I wound up having to leave a comment anonymously because Blogger insisted my Google account doesn’t exist… even though in another window I was logged into Gmail. Duh!

Many folks out there, I know, are experiencing the same big headaches when trying to visit and participate on your friends’ Blogger blogs. I probably have 30-40 Blogger blogs that are don’t-miss to me that I drop by every day and usually leave a comment on, and several more that I visit at least weekly. If it’s not Blogger freezing up indefinitely, it’s telling me my Google account doesn’t exist as in the above. Or - and this is getting to be just about an everyday thing - in the course of two hours of blog reading, I will have had to re-log in to Blogger/Google a couple dozen or more times.

If Blogger users are noticing a drop in participation in discussion on their blogs lately, this is all probably why. There’s only two Blogger blogs I visit regularly right now that are not making me log in yet again or refusing to accept my login, so unless I’ve got something I just can’t not comment on, I’m kind of just reading and moving along without commenting these days. Unless they’re using HaloScan for comments, which that seems to be working okay. Otherwise, trying to comment and participate is just getting to be too much hassle on most of the Blogger blogs.

I’m convinced now that this was Blogger’s biggest mistake - because it’s tied into what I previously said was their big mistake of releasing Beta/New without giving users a way to switch completely back to the Old Blogger platform - the different logins for Old Blogger and Beta/New were a huge mistake. I realize why they did it, since now Blogger is run by Google and they want to get everyone on Google accounts, which will consolidate all plug-ins and everything else to that account.

But what they really should have done is stuck the switch that flips between Old Blogger and New/Beta elsewhere and not attached to people’s logins, and also made EVERY Blogger user register a Google account before rolling Beta out, and COMPLETELY eradicate the old login once done (even while folks were still using Old Blogger). And probably just eliminated the ability to use old templates altogether, much as many would have been upset about it. Instead, they’ve created a hell of a mess over there.

I mean, come on. If I’m logged into my Gmail account already, and then Blogger tells me my Google account info doesn’t exist? You guys got a major problem, Googleblogger.

Actually, strike all that “should have” above. What Googleblogger really should have done is waited about a year before even rolling it all out in the first place and have had most of the problems that have plagued it and sent people running screaming elsewhere ironed out already. Instead, by using the entire Blogger userbase as guinea pigs, they’ve lost many of their longtime users to other platforms and are continuing to drive many current users - but especially their readers - insane. It’s been over six months now. Things shouldn’t still be as bad over there as they are.

I hear occasionally from others who are still using Blogger, or a family member is, that they never have any problems. I know that probably is the truth for them, and they’ve been really, really lucky. But I’d almost bet that the majority of their readers are experiencing many of the same difficulties above when trying to comment. In any case, if things are seeming a little quieter than usual at your Blogger lair in the last month or so, all of this is probably why.

Still digging thru e-mail and still working on the large project - if you’ve e-mailed and I haven’t gotten back to you yet on something, probably will in the next 24 hours of so.

UPDATE: I know Blogger bloggers are trying to do what they can to make things better for their readers, but I think most of the problems right now are stuff y’all, the blog authors/owners, don’t have much control over… see my response in Comments here about that.

I totally missed it because it happened so fast, but WordPress had a brief outage and slowdown the other morning, which some of us recent converts to WP from Blogger had been discussing amongst ourselves as well as this conversation over at Kat’s place. Well, I think I did notice the slowdown, but not much because it didn’t last long.

So anyway, this note from Matt at WordPress made me smile when I came across it yesterday. No major outages since May 2006? Take that, Blogger!

Jeez, the simple fact alone that info like this even gets posted and shared by WP folks, and that they address problems in the forums and issue frequent updates and ETA on resolutions when glitches come up, is enough to make me fall in love with it. If WordPress was a man, I’d marry it.

In the meantime, I continue to keep up with the almost daily reports of the latest errors and outages, as well as silence from Blogger powers that be and lack of communication or updates, chronicled in Blogger user sites like here and here and here as well as some other places and Blogger user forums. In recent weeks, I have seen even some of the biggest Blogger expert users, many of whom were championing the Blogger cause throughout all the Beta headaches and were previously urging other users to keep giving it a chance and hang on, now seemingly have become about as disgruntled and disillusioned as an overwhelming number of users have.

I feel for ‘em all, but witnessing this and the ongoing problems just further makes me happy I jumped to WordPress. Viva la WordPress, y’all!

I don’t know which of these I enjoyed reading more, this one or this one. I probably enjoyed both equally and definitely enjoyed both immensely. Hehe.

And I only twisted Mack’s arm a LITTLE bit. No firearms here.

In other news, I think I have given up on Project 365, unfortunately. It wasn’t intentional, but with me working at home, I was running out of things of serious daily interest. And, I did indeed lose the ones that I took but lost. Not that I won’t still be taking pictures of goofy stuff or anything. Oh, no doubt about that.

See here.

(I figured this would get your attention pretty quick and I don’t have Grandefille’s e-mail address…)

Three quick things…

If you use Bloglines as a feed reader and aren’t getting feed updates of some of the NIT community that have moved from Blogger to WordPress (or other WP users), you’re not alone. I did some investigating last night and found that the issue had been reported to both Bloglines and WordPress, and the word from Bloglines is basically “they’re working on it”, but I noted some frustration among the Bloglines users in the forum because apparently this was reported a while ago and there’s been some heel-dragging in resolving it. It would appear to me (who does not use Bloglines as a reader) that the problem would be on Bloglines’ end, because both the regular WordPress RSS feeds and those that are also using Feedburner as an additional feed are showing up immediately in both the reader I am using now and the one I was using previously. I could be wrong, but that’s sure how it looks to me, especially since I know all the Feedburner feeds I have set up or have helped set up on WordPress are set to ping Bloglines automatically with updates.

Second, WordPress has just come out with an importer for New Blogger to WordPress and it works beautifully. I’m told getting a new importer going was a hot topic for WordPress recently; they certainly took notice of all the Blogger flight to WordPress going on. Talk about being quickly responsive to user needs and wants! That’s awesome.

And last - Hutchmo and I were planning to lunch at the Mothership this coming Saturday because I somehow managed to not have any BBQ last weekend, which is ridiculous since I, as a Memphian, should be trying the local BBQ everywhere I go for comparison, right? So I was determined to go back and have some BBQ this weekend, but I was planning to come back anyway and celebrate Sista’s birthday (she’ll be 29, you see). And we knew Newscoma was likely to still be in town.**

So basically, heck, if you’re in town this weekend and want some BBQ for lunch and would like to wish your Sista a Happy 27th Birthday, come on down. We’ll be there around noonish or so. I already shot Knuck an e-mail to let him know he might wanna expect a bigger lunch crowd on Saturday, so come on down and wish Sista a Happy 24th if you have a mind to, we’ll be there.***

I really need to post about what a great weekend last weekend was, but I think my brain has been frozen since I got back to town. But I have some neat stuff and observations to share, so surely before I go to Nashville AGAIN, I’ll get around to posting about my last trip there, sheesh.

** (Almost everything in this paragraph is