It'll be just like starting over

I just marked 270 blog posts "as read" on Google Reader.

I must use it every day. I must. I must. Repeat 100 times.

How I plan to accomplish this:

1. Get home from work. Ignore breakfast dishes left out in the kitchen, accumulated mess strewn about the living room table, professional blog post to be written, the possibility of making yet another $25.00 donation to Barack's campaign, and the overwhelming desire to scour MySpace and Facebook for traces of what my youngest daughter is up to.

2. Get out of my faux-pro work outfit and toss on something scruffy and scroungy that reminds my husband that I am, after all, an American.

3. Get a glass of wine alone (!!) and before dinner (!!!), which reminds my husband...etc.

4. Get onto my Google Reader.

Does that sound like a plan?

Good Google Reader Housekeeping

Feeling a little overwhelmed by all things Internet-related, and perhaps all things period, I just undertook a major clean-up of my Google Reader.

I was trying to limit myself to 50 subscriptions, but was slipping up toward 60. Is that a lot? Not really?

I just know that I was feeling discouraged when I opened, with some dread, the Reader over the weekend (because I never managed to keep up during the week, which is supposed to be the idea, right?) and was finding upwards of 150 unread posts.

So, to get an idea of reasonable dimensions, I asked a very Internet-oriented friend of mine how many feeds he had: around 30.

Definitely time to sweep up.

Blogger, Mozilla and Internet Explorer

I downloaded Mozilla Firefox a month or two back, and have been able to make a few observations about how it interacts with Blogger compared to IE. This may not be the same for you, but the realizations I have made have helped me work out a few problems.

1. When I post using Mozilla, Blogger will not display the "comments" function

Once I got Mozilla, I started using it with Blogger because I liked the navigation tabs, which helped me to avoid shutting Blogger down accidentally and losing whole posts or parts of posts that I hadn't saved as drafts yet. (Sound familiar to anyone?)

However, around the same time, I realized that some of my posts were not coming up with comments enabled. This was most annoying and I had never had that problem before, but didn't immediately make the Mozilla connection. Out of habit, I was still doing some posts on IE, so it was not a constant problem.

The other day though, I posted using Mozilla, saw that the comments weren't enabled, and immediately reposted using IE. Presto, change-o: the comment function was there.

2. With Mozilla, I can cut and paste my photos on Blogger.

Posting multiple photos was very complicated for me with Blogger and IE because the cut and paste function would not work, and also photos were always automatically loaded to the top of the page (this may still be the case.) So I had to pre-plan the order of my photos, load them in the correct sequence, and write my text around them.

With Mozilla, I can move my photos around and cut and paste them -- a big time-saver for me.

3. In conclusion:

I now write my posts on Mozilla for the tabs and photo possibilities, save them as drafts, then do the final post on IE!

Kind of complicated, but I hope this information might be useful to someone. Mimi, for example, has mentioned to me that she was having some comment enabling problems with Blogger. Maybe I've found the solution!

And So....What?

This was supposed to be my "just for fun" blog. This was supposed to be where I just tossed out quick posts in ten minutes, perhaps even daily. This was supposed to be a place to share so many things I love, hate, find funny or ironic, or simply want to keep a record of.

So why is it so hard to just blog subjects up, out, over or whatever?

I have bookmarked at least fifty links that I thought would be worthy of writing about on "And So Forth." Your blog may be among them!

What if I just started dealing with them one by one?

The Big Dive

After much research and advice-seeking, I finally decided to just change my Blogger template for my major blog, La France Profonde. I was a little disappointed that the templates offered with the Beta version were the same old same old, but I just couldn't stand that lime-green heading any longer. So it's gone!

I also changed my Flickr badge, got rid of a few other items, and got to try some of Blogger's new functions, like the drag and drop sidebar system. It's pretty cool! It all feels like spring cleaning...

I'm Finally on New Blogger! And so...

After weeks of trying, today I was finally able to make all of my blogs "migrate" to New Blogger.

What does that mean? I thought it might mean categories, but now I'm not so sure.

I have already been tempted by promises of being able to change my layout, but at the same time, Blogger warns about the many elements we will lose if we make a change...hmmm...

I suppose And So Forth, being a new blog, will be a good testing ground!