Cleaning Up Blogger: Theory Into Practice

A few weeks ago, I published a explanation of how I cleaned up my Pinterest boards.  While there are a lot of great posts on the theory of pinning and blogging responsibly when it comes to proper sourcing and appropriate crediting, I was totally overwhelmed by the thought of putting it all into practice.  I am by no means an expert in any sphere of social media, but I thought that it might be helpful to you all to see how a normal blogger took the plunge and got it done.  From your comments, it looks like I may have been right!

Similarly, there's been a lot of talk on the interwebs about putting less pressure on ourselves as bloggers - we've finally realized that we simply can't keep up the pace we've set for curating, creating, and staying current with our peers.  (My favorite posts about changing the prevailing attitudes are here, here, and here.)  Again, though, it sounds good - but how do you put it into practice?  Back in November, I guest-posted on Whitney's blog about On:Off Relationships, and I suggested that the bottom line is we're all consumers when it comes to the internet: "It takes great force of will to walk away from the bloggers and/or tweeters that you don’t like or agree with.  But the thing that makes our online relationships different from our adult real life relationships is that we choose to spend our time on them."

That's easier said than done even when you're decidedly not friends with the bloggers that you're thinking about removing from your feed.  What happens when you are friends with them - or friendly, at least, online - and you still feel overwhelmed by the number of blogs you follow?  Here's how I put the theory into practice and started simplifying my Blogger dashboard...

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The first and easiest thing I did was unfollow almost every blog I had ever found through a giveaway.  If I started following a blog just for an extra entry but I never visited the blog again, I removed it from my feed.  I also made myself promise that I wouldn't follow any blog anymore just because I wanted to win a free design or a discount to an Etsy store or even straight up money, but that's probably a topic for another post...

I had also been following blogs that I didn't know well because I liked the first post I read - I'd found them via link-ups on other blogs or through the tweetvine, usually, but I'd been too busy to get stuck in and just clicked that blue GFC button as a way to save the blogs for later.  The thing was, though, that I almost never went back to those blogs.  They just clogged up my dashboard and stressed me out because they contributed to the exponentially increasing number of unread posts that stared accusingly at me every day.  So I set aside a whole evening and went through each blog.  If, after reading through the archives, I still wanted to follow one, I did; if I didn't, I unfollowed.  Then I made myself promise, again, that I'd think before adding a new blog.  If I didn't have time to explore it, I'd bookmark the address for later rather than following blindly.

Next, I went through and unfollowed most of the "professional" blogs I had subscribed to.  (I'm putting the word in quotes because I'm sure that everyone has a different definition for it, but to me it means a blog written by someone for whom being a blogger is major part of their full-time business.  Examples here are Design For Mankind and Seventeenth & Irving.)  I love them and read them voraciously, but it's hard to keep up with their posts in real time, so I moved them to a special bookmarked folder in my browser.  That way I can check in every week and catch up when I have the freedom to devour them without feeling like I need to skim to make the most of my time.  There are a few blogs that I'd put in this professional category that I do still follow because I've developed relationships with the bloggers - like Kate from Katelyn Brooke and Lisa at elembee - but otherwise I'm going to treat these blogs the same way I do wedding sites.

Finally, and hardest of all, I faced the blogs that I really do like, often because I feel a connection to the blogger, but just don't feel compelled to read often.  Again, they stressed me out every time I skipped over them when scrolling down my dashboard, and at the end of the day I really don't need that kind of pressure.  So I removed the blogs completely - I unfollowed them without saving the addresses anywhere - but I made sure to follow the blogger on Twitter.  That way I could see what they were up to spontaneously, which was usually what I wanted a peek of anyway, and I could click on any links they shared that intrigued me without really committing.

I'm delighted to say that I'm down to 88 blogs on my Blogger dashboard.  It sounds like a lot when you count them up, but it's nearly half of the number I'd been following a few weeks ago.  The number will go up and down, of course, as I continue discovering new blogs and as blogs I've read for a while continue to evolve in ways that, to be honest, I may not always be interested in being part of, but I feel much better now that I've identified a strategy.  The only caveat I'd give to my method is that I never use Google reader, so it could be that none of this will work for you if you do.  I feel like I don't actually get to know every dimension of a blog when seeing it in the reader, which would both stress me out more and make it harder for me to figure out which blogs I really did want to be following.  Maybe the caveat leads to this suggestion: rely less on Google reader and more on your dashboard, if you use Blogger, to help you focus!

Do let me know if you have other suggestions or if you've tried anything similar!  I'd love to hear what has helped you.  It's a work in progress for all of us, I think, so please do share how you've started putting these theories into practice.  And I hope you're having a wonderful weekend, dear readers - if you're in the DC area, get outside into spring!