Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts

Thursday, 14 March 2013

Any recommendations for feed reader alternative?





I don't have a FB account, nor do I really hang on Twitter or Google+ despite having accounts there. No, my favourite social media is Pinterest and blogs. I subscribe to a huge number of blogs. Some because I enjoy reading them or look at the pictures, other beacuse they're great resources for my other blog. All in all, I like the free format blogs offer compared to, say, Twitter which is all about short sentences and no pics. Well, there are attached pics of cause, but no immediate visual appeal like with blogs and Pinterest. I might be old-fashioned, not wanting to be on places like Facebook and just focusing on blogs.

Daily, I depend on Google Reader, a free online feed reader, to keep up with the flow of blog posts and articles (it's not just blogs that have rss feeds). But now Google have decided to shut down their feed reader. Missed the news, but when logging on today there was a box saying Reader is to be closed down in July and would I like to learn more.

What to do? One can still hope they change their minds as I like the reader. But it's not likely, is it? It's business and business doesn't care about how I feel. Instead I need to find an alternative. A free, online rss feed reader. One that's easy to use and that I can rely on. Reliability is very important. Finding Google Reader via my Blogger dashboard, I never looked at the alternatives when starting to follow blogs so I have no idea what alternatives there are out there.

Perhaps I'll find a fab reader by summer (when Google Reader close down) and forget about ever using Google Reader, but right now it just feels like a huge task to find an alternative to rely on and then getting used to. And to move all my blog feeds to. I'm already feeling stressed, worrying that I'm going to lose blogs when moving to a new reader.

So... Anyone out there have a recommendation for another reader, a good place to go to instead of Google? I want a simple, easy-to-use reader that doesn't require having to download a software as I'm mostly using either my parents' computer or, on rare occasions, a laptop and can't install whatever I want (not that they'd notice, but still: I want an online service). And it needs to be free as I'm still poor. If it's easy to import all my blog feeds from Google Reader to the new service it'd be even better.

Monday, 1 August 2011

My aliases online

 So I just joined Pinterest and I've been tweeking my Twitter page. I have a really lame Twitter accounted that's pretty much never been used other than to follow a couple of people/shops and I've never even tweeted once. I just haven't gotten into it, merely stood by the side when others have had fun. Kind of like at the amusement parks where I've always been too chicken to go with my friends on most of the rides. And so I join Pinterest, yet another facet of social media, without having a clue how to get started with it. I mean, it's not as I need another place to be social at (I'm not a social person and rubbish at socializing really) and spend more time at the computer to keep updated. But I did it. And I'm thinking of becoming more active on Flickr, which I've mostly used to publish pics to be hotlinked in forums or challenge entries (at the Art Bead Scene group mostly).

But that's not really what I wanted to post about. What prompted this post was that all this made me think about how to be recognized online as I started to join communities and websites before I began thinking about having one common online alias, one online persona. How can someone I "meet" on Flickr know that maneki-neko girl is the same person as Vildros on Etsy or kristina on UKBF? I like being somewhat anonymous and have used different aliases so separate the beader from the fantasy reader and so on, but at some point I feel I should tie some of my accounts together so people know that behind the different names is one person, Maneki (which pretty much is my online beading persona, I rarely use my real name online anymore).

Most of the time my alias nowadays is Maneki  --capital m or not, it varies -- but I still use some different names you might know me under. Here are a few sites where you can find me under different names. Links go to my profile page on each website.

Blogger: maneki
ColourLovers: maneki
Etsy: Vildros (no shop, just shopping)

Flickr: Maneki-neko girl  (Katten & Draken is my old account)

Pinterest: ManekiBeader

Twitter: ManekiBeader (used to be ManekisParlblog; haven't tweeted even once)

Uk Beaders Forum: kristina

On forums like Smyckestillverkning iFokus, Nätverket Inspira etc, I'm Maneki.

*

Coming up with a good alias is hard, which I discovered when I joined Pärlplatsen, one of the first online communities I joined. I couldn't think of even one good name and in the end I gave up and wrote down Maneki-neko girl because it was something I'd come up with one day after fallen in love with the japanese maneki-neko lucky cats. Anyway, that stuck, but because it was so long many abbreviated it, calling me m-n or maneki. And nowadays Maneki is pretty much my beading alias -- eventhough the name makes no sense to anyone who understands japanese. One several other forums I joined as a newbie beader I didn't use that alias, though, but instead went with the thuroughly unimaginative kristina (most of the time not capitalizing my name).Not only is it my first name, but it's also a very common name in Sweden so it's easy to be confused with another Kristina or Christina.
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