Following blogs...

I use Google Reader to follow my most favorite blogs.  Not all are quilting related, some are family, some are friends but a huge chunk are quilters.  Recently I’ve noticed a trend on Google Reader… many quilters are showing only the first three or four lines on their blogs forcing you to go read the entire entry on their web page.  And then when you get to that web page, it’s almost impossible to find the entry among all the ads, followers, maps, weather reports and who knows what else. 

So let me analyze what I am spending my time on…  I read three lines of Ms Quilters’ blog and want to see more, so I click on the URL.  It takes 34 seconds for the page to open fully because she has so much on there.  (And I am on high speed net)  At the top of the page is a HUGE header, takes up my entire 17 inch screen.  So I scroll down a bit, more of that same header, followed by her tabs, which there are so many of you can barely read what they say.  Scrolling down some more I find two ads, one on the left and one on the right.  On one side the ad is quilt related, on the other, far from it.  I am not real sure what THAT has to do with quilting so I’m not sure why she has ads like that on her site. 

Scrolling down some more I find on one side of the screen a list of blogs she likes to read, a list of her key words, the blog archive, every day every month for the last twenty years, a list of her finished quilts, a list of her unfinished quilts, her local weather report, and another advertisement.  On the other side of the page is her calendar, not one month, but three with where she was every single day for the last three months. 

Now let me pause here to say something… if I was a burglar who lived in her area I would pay close attention to this calendar.  She is gone to this club every Tuesday and that organization every Wednesday and has her hair done every Friday morning.  How convenient of her to tell me when she’s not going to be home.  

Back to the other side of the page where under the three months of her calendar the burglar so enjoyed I see a Live Traffic Feed with where the last 200 readers came from, photos of all her blog followers, a list of the swaps she participating in, a list of all the blog rings she belongs to (I didn’t know there were that many!) and a list of her favorite web sites. 

And crammed in between those lists is her blog entry for the day, in the tiniest font possible to publish

Apparently she doesn’t think people come to read what she has to say anymore, so I guess I will just delete her from my list of favorites.  And I think I will check my own blog and see how I can unclutter it!