Other blogs

I have being enjoying keeping my eye on my thoughts, my experiences and things that happen for items I want to write about.  I have been putting somewhere between 200 and 500 words on this blog most days since I began in March of 2008.  Having retired both from teaching fulltime and from online teaching for Capella University, I first thought I would try to put ideas about meditation somewhere that interested people could see them. Over time, I realized that being retired, I was at leisure to write about whatever came to mind.  

Many of my friends are bombarded with junk mail from the U.S. Post Office, unwanted ads on television and from other sources, too.  I found I had small chance or none of getting anyone to visit my web site or blog.  The settings for creating and maintaining a (Google) Blogger blog include the possibility of inserting the email addresses of up to 10 people that posts can be emailed to.  Ten seemed a bit small since I regularly write to more like 50 people.  But the settings include an email address which can be used to email posts into a blog.  No problem.  I started emailing posts into the blog and to friends.

Naturally, I noticed the 70 million other blogs also available to be read on the web.  Since then, the figure has grown to 100 million.  As I paid more attention to the others, I began to find some of interest.  I learned about 'feeds', which are very small programs that send new posts added to a blog so that without the trouble of visiting a large number of interesting blogs, any new post is available, in one's email inbox or in somewhere else, like Google's Reader.  Or, my main blog is also a good place to have a snippet of some of my favorites appear so that people who visit my blog can also see recent postings in other blogs.  The settings allow the snippets to come up with the most recent ones at the top.  But as I learn of more and more interesting columns to read, the list has grown to about 45, too many to list on my own blog page.  

So far, I have not found a good place to simply post the snippets, much like the experience of looking over a rack of magazines, where you can see a few headlines in each but you have to delve inside for more information.  I plan to offer a local class in the fall on how to blog and I have started a new blog called "Blogging in Retirement".  For now, I am crowding that page with the full list of blogs I have been following.  I don't find them all interesting all the time, just as I read some articles in a magazine but not others.  To see the whole clickable steadily updated list, from Dr. Oz to the comedian Loretta LaRue, from Flowing Data on graphic displays of information to the Educational Optimist on Wisconsin higher education policy, click here

http://blogginginretirement.blogspot.com/

Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety