Today was blog clean-up day for me. I cleaned out and organized my three email account inboxes. I tweaked some things over at Medium Dreams. But the majority of my day was spent here at GetSheila. Lookie over in the right sidebar. A poll! Aren't you lucky? No, the right sidebar. That's it. Down...down...a little further. There you go! Don't forget to vote. This one is about Halloween. I will try to put a new poll up every week or so. The excitement is almost painful, isn't it?
The real beauty is over in the left sidebar. What? You say it doesn't look much different? Well, a lot YOU know. It is vastly different. It just looks the same. Here, let me walk you through it:
- The first new thing you see is "From Medium Dreams." This handy widget shows you the five most recent posts I have made over on Medium Dreams, where I blog about the TV show Medium. It is my attempt to gently entice you to click over there.
Below that is the new and improved but not yet ready for prime time blogroll. (The "not yet ready" part will soon become clear.)- The last thing you see in the left sidebar is a widget that shows the most recent eight sites that link to GetSheila. Woo-hoo! People actually link to me sometimes!
One of the reasons I chose NewsGator as my feed reader was because it said, "Automatically show the blogs & news feeds you read, on your blog." Kewl! I don't have to manually enter links to the blogs I read anymore. Since I subscribe to all of them in NewsGator, I can pull them into my blog from there. And...AND...my blog will automatically update when I add or delete a feed. Eureka!
Do you see the flaw in my thinking? If so, you catch on way faster than I do.
I spent hours today setting up different categories (health, personal blogs, etc.) in NewsGator and mapping the feeds to the appropriate category. At the end of the day I had a beautiful, categorized blogroll showing all the blogs. The best part was that I would never have to mess with the blogroll again because it would all flow automatically from NewsGator. Just look at it over there in the left sidebar. Isn't it pretty? I know it is just text, but it is organized and current text. I would urge you to admire the beauty, but it jacked up my site so I had to take it down. Effin' NewsGator! Please read the rest of this post as if the links were really there, m'kay?
Just don't click on any of the links.
Oh, you did? Um, sorry. Yeah, I would be annoyed too if I clicked on a link that looks like it will take me to a web page only to find myself on that crap XML page that needs a feed reader to decode. WTF?
OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. These are the XML feeds not links to the actual sites!
NewsGator is a feed reader. It should have occurred to me sooner that I was dealing with feeds and not links. But they even call it a "blogroll" which is always a list of link to other blogs, not to their feeds! BASTARDS!
I am disgusted. I am tired. I may switch to Bloglines just to show them, stupid NewsGator. And this isn't my only disappointment with them. They also advertise "Smart Feeds" (plural) with the free version of their product but you only get one. If you want more than one, you have to upgrade to the version that costs actual money. (A smart feed uses keywords to search for feeds, e.g. I could set up a smart feed for "Sheila Livingston" to see who is talking about me on the web. No one, BTW, in case you were wondering.)
So if you click on a link and get a garbage page, it must be Sunday and I haven't got round to fixing it yet. Or maybe not. I haven't decided what I am going to do yet. Take them down and manually set up links again? Leave the pretty links up and run the risk of alienating all of you nice people when the link doesn't take you where you expect it to? Or do I just take them all down and say, TO HELL WITH IT. I DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' LINKS!
I just don't know. What do you think?
