Connecting, Reading, Sharing

A couple of years ago, Blogger discontinued the follow-by-email widget.  That was a bummer for some of my friends and family (and me), but I lacked the technical know-how to fix it at the time.  

My dad sent me a shirt recently.  It reads: "That's What I Do - I Read Books and I Know Things."  He's so sweet.  The ever growing lava lamp choir is in the background.  2/7/2023

Blogger also changed the layout of the landing page when I sign into my blog.  Formerly I would land on the "Reading List" and see all the lovely new posts my blog friends had published.  These days I land on a list of my own posts upon sign-in.  The "reading list" has been relegated to the bottom of the dashboard...where I would forget about checking it all too often.  I got quite out of touch with my blog friends and, strange as it may sound since I've never actually met any of them, those people mean a lot to me.

A screenshot of the new subscribe by email widget.  It is located with the "tags" and "archive" links on the sidebar of my blog.  This screenshot also captures my propensity to run my phone battery down to 1% before charging it...  I like to "live on the edge," as my friends have said. ;)

Fast forward to January and I resolved to finally crack this nut.  After reading some tech articles and tutorials, trying to figure out some minor HTML coding, checking Blogger message boards and support pages, and a whole lot of googling I found something that takes care of both problems for me.  It is called "follow.it" and it is a free RSS feed/reader.   I've been testing it for the past month and am pretty pumped about it.  I think it will work!

A screenshot from my email showing what a new post will look like when delivered to my inbox by the new RSS feed.

When someone enters their email in the widget on the sidebar of my blog they will start to receive the posts via email.  Meanwhile, I have populated my "follow.it" feed with the URLs for Teresa's blog, Margo's, Lisa's, and so on and so forth.  Now their new posts are emailed to me the next day.

My first ever Grasshopper.  Matt is becoming quite the home bartender.  2/15/2023

So, yay!  I'm all caught up with my blog friends!  My readers can subscribe by email again!  Cheers to that!