This week has illustrated to me that there are many aspects of my blogging workflow and tools that I take for granted.
Firstly I’ve been taking my broadband internet connection at home for granted. You see this week we’ve actually been house sitting a friend’s house while ours gets painted. We move back today. Our friends are on a DSL connection but it can’t be much faster than 256 and I think in the last two days it might have been shaped back to dial up speeds (probably because I used up their monthly bandwidth allowance in the three days preceding that. I can’t wait to get back home to my fast connection.
Secondly I’ve been taking blog’s RSS feeds for granted. Many of you who use Bloglines would have been unable to read this blog’s feed for the last three or so days (at least the last 20 or so posts). There was some sort of glitch with Feedburner and Bloglines (I don’t really understand it but apparently there was a change at Feedburner that meant Bloglines were unable to get my feed right). It seems to be working again now (if you were affected by this, my apologies – I missed you!) but it’s made me realize just how reliant ProBlogger.net is upon RSS because this blog felt a little like a ghost town with RSS readership down by 2000 daily readers and overall visitor and comments down significantly. In fact it wasn’t just me who noticed it, I’ve had a few readers email to see why there have been so few comments lately.
I’m sure there are other technologies that I’m taking for granted every day to run my little business but as they say, you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone. I think I’ll appreciate things a little more from now on (for a few days til I get too busy to again.
Update: I just found two other things I take for granted –
1. Electricity – Just after getting home and unpacking a freak storm hit our suburb. We escaped the flooding that got our neighbourhood but lost power. It’s still out now 6 hours later – so we’ve gone back to our house sitters house (and the dial up) for a little powered entertainment (and light).
2. Little Toes – Ok, so this hasn’t obscured my blogging that much, but it’s made me appreciate my little toe. As I was moving things back around our house this afternoon I dropped a full bottle of wine (a merlot) on my little toe. It’s now a very deep purple and almost three times it’s normal size – quite probably broken.
Doh!
It’s been quite the 24 hours or so. I’m glad I’m off to Coolum tomorrow for a few days in a 5 star hotel!
I’m on vacation for two weeks in March, and I am now looking forward to all of this ;-) I will be skipping the RSS, but posting daily pictures via Flickr to tide it all over *g* I’m gunna have so much to read when I get back..
That is so true, I’ve come to rely on Bloglines and it would be a real pain to replace it. Having absolutely no readership, I’m not so much worried about my feed. Another tool I’d hate to lose is email. There are so many things tied to email addresses now that it would be more than just an inconvenience.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I would feel lost without my current PC setup. I customized it so much to my liking that if I go on another computer (other than my laptop), I would feel lost – shortcuts different, programs missing, and stuff.
Feedburner is so complicated these days and swallows your URL whole, I’ve long given up on it. The basic: /feed from WP is almost always up in Bloglines, unless they’ve got a problem.
The other thing we depend on is our server company / host. When that went down for four hours recently, my whole day collapsed :-)
Hey Darren,
Now I don’t feel so all alone. When you lose something you depend on like a host for a day, you really miss it.
Sorry to hear about your little toe… LOL
Joe
What good are little toes except for breaking and always bumping them into the legs of coffee tables? I swear I have gotten used to the pain now; it’s just a part of my everyday clumsy life. =)
hi ,everybody