Site News: Changes To "Five Best Blogs" & "Weekend Reading"

As with most things, there are some good and bad aspects to the changes I've made recently to my daily and weekly roundups ("Five Best Blogs" and "Weekend Reading").  Since a couple of you have asked (or complained), I thought I'd take a moment to explain what I'm doing and why.  Basically, I'm now sending out the items Twitter first, and then using a blog widget to make them appear on this blog, too.  For those of you on Twitter, you get my recommendations (to use the term loosely) immediately, rather than waiting for me to collect them all and post them at the end of the day / weekend. Ditto for those of you on Facebook, where everything gets posted automatically in something close to real time.  For those of you who love coming here to the blog site and seeing what's what, it's a messier setup than before, I realize, but a small price to pay I hope.  (If anyone can give me some advice, I still hope to figure out how to make it so that you only see what I Tweet out, not the retweets and responses from others using the #5bb or #thisweekined hashtags.)  The main weakness of this approach is that the individual items I've posted don't show up in RSS readers like Google Reader or Bloglines, which I and many others use to speed read the Internet.  I'm reassured knowing that most of you who use RSS are also on Twitter, and the new approach has the advantage of notifying you if yours is one of the chosen items rather than making you check to see, and making it easier to pass along individual items (your own or someone else's).  I'm not sure what to do about the RSS reader situation.  Again, any advice appreciated.  Is anyone else doing it better or differently?  I may well be missing some obvious solution.  

 

Comments

[Mary]

The new format is useless for me. Yes, I have twitter, but I don't use it as an information source.

The green bars keep scrolling, so instead of 5 blogs, I see the same one over and over, and a lot of green lines. I've quit checking, since I can surf Google faster to find the new things that interest me. I'll miss the cross-section, though.