HItting the Cyber Wall Again

There are two things that have continually been a thorn in the side as I've tried to participate in the online sewing community.

The first has been photo hosting...trying to find SOMEONE who can host photos that I can access for reviews and such without the need to go back and relink the photos every 18 months or so.  I think I'm on the 4th time for updating the links for some of the older reviews....two of the photo hosting sites that I used closed shop and a third one seems to randomly mess with the links; what clicked through to a specific photo one week will just bring up the whole album the next week.  Very frustrating.

The second is the feed collectors... places to subscribe and read all the new posts in one spot.  I think the first one I used was Bloglines; they went away and I moved to Google Reader, then they closed up shop and I tried Bloglovin' before landing on the Old Reader, who threatened to go away but found new owners and stabilized.

However, when I logged in today I found that the Old Reader has instituted a 'premium' service, available at the introductory price of $20/year, effective immediately.

They say they wanted to avoid using advertising, and  have cool new features available for folks who want to subscribe.    But, not to worry, they said, they will still have a free version for folks who have less than 100 subscriptions.  And, while the new pricing is in effect now, they are graciously giving everyone 'about 2 weeks' to look things over and make up their minds.

Now, I am not opposed to paying for services.  But someone dug into the 'terms of service' and found some clause that was left over from the previous free version that basically said that the administrators were reserving the right to terminate the service without notice.  Pretty bad if you've paid for a year.

This seems to be pretty heavy handed.  Not the sort of service I'm interested in paying for.

But I had 227 subscriptions.

So I began to delete subscriptions.  First to go were all of them that had not been updated in the last six months or so (with one or two exceptions...if those folks ever post an update, I want to know...).  That was quite  a lot, actually; I was surprised at how many hadn't been updated in over a year.

But that left me still well over a hundred.  So I went back again and culled all of them that weren't really what I read blogs for...blogs that had morphed into knitting or quilting or cute pictures of grandchildren or lots of links to other places on the 'net.

Still over a hundred.  Now I had to steel myself and be ruthless.  I went back again and removed subscriptions to blogs that I had subscribed to a while but, for one reason or another, I just didn't make a connection with the blogger.  Nice stuff, nice work, but ...sigh.

After all that, I was still at 112.  I reminded myself that I still have subscriptions to all but the very newest ones over on Bloglovin', so it's not like I'm cutting folks out of my life forever.  I took a breath and looked at folks who had posted within the last few months, but the post before that one was six months or so older.  Seldom updated blogs.

Finally, I just had to randomly pick two or three to cut.  It wasn't easy, but I got it down to 99.  And every one of the names on that list are blogs I recognize....intentional subscriptions.

But I'm hoping to bite the bullet and switch to Bloglovin, so I can just delete the Old Reader account.  Because that's just going to be too much trouble to maintain two separate lists.  Besides, they rather ticked me off.

To be honest, if my blog was on the list I probably would've cut it, too...not enough inspirational sewing going on at the moment, just rehashes of old things that don't really fit any more. 

So that made me appreciate anyone who is still following along here.  Thanks for hanging with me; hopefully better sewing days are ahead. ;-)