Blog Talk: I cleaned up the list of blogs that I follow and discovered that I had a serious blog hoarding problem
I don't know about you but I know I'm guilty of following more blogs than what I have time to actually keep up with. There's just so many good or promising ones out there! I finally decided to do a long overdue clean-up.
Let me just say, there is no easy way to do this. Not that I know of anyway. I wish sites like BlogLovin' had a feature that would sort blogs by date of their last post rather than only having the ability to sort all posts by dates. With the later it is hard to figure out which blogs you haven't visited in a while because they've gone the way side.
Here's a little perspective of what my clean-up involved. On GFC I was following 68 blogs. I decided that 3 months of dead time and minimum of 2 posts per month would be my main criteria for unfollowing. Other obvious factors were change in blog topic (from books), deleted blogs, blogs turned private, URL switches, and those that no longer fit my taste. I spent about 30 minutes clicking, checking dates, checking average post times, and doing a quick scan of the site...that's less than 30 seconds per site! That may sound quick to judge, but you can find out a lot in 30 seconds. One thing I discovered was that I indiscriminately followed a lot of sites once upon a time...
By the end of it I wound up with 6 blogs via GFC. I consolidated about five using BlogLovin' and the six I had left were those not connected to BlogLovin'. Pretty darn good I say!
The big time sucker was BlogLovin where I followed a whopping 568 people. Honestly, I don't know how that happened. Okay, that's a not so honest statement. I have a habit (good or bad) of following most of the new blogs that I find if I think they have potential to keep going in the long haul. But I had NO idea that I was following quite that many. The problem is that I easily lose track of start-ups on BlogLovin (since you can't sort blogs by date of their last post) and I don't keep track of which ones I visit more frequently than others. Certain names are obvious, but only those who reciprocate and keep active on my blog.
I ended up going through the blogs in alpha order. By the time I made it to the C's I was down to 544. Not too bad! By "H" I had made it to 530. I finally hit under 500 by the N's. At the end of my first run through (2 hours later) I was down to 435! Not too bad for the quickie scan of the clearly vacated blogs.
Next I went for the "Do I really like the material" scan. This one was harder to do because it was obviously more time consuming to do a thorough scan of each site's material. I made sure that they were sites that I found useful and that I would recommend to others. After another 3 hours I made it down to 259! That's still a lot of blogs to follow, but that's a pretty good sort through I'd say. While that is a lot, I don't think it's too many for BlogLovin' since everyone has different posting schedules and types of posts.
I'm making a mental note to be more judicious in my following, but who knows how long that will last. As I said earlier, I love to follow new blogs to see where they go. But if they stop posting without me realizing, they get shuffled to the bottom of my feed and the ghost blogs start building up...
Do you follow a lot of blogs? Do you frequently do blog checks or do you tend to let them fall to the bottom of the list over the years?
Let me just say, there is no easy way to do this. Not that I know of anyway. I wish sites like BlogLovin' had a feature that would sort blogs by date of their last post rather than only having the ability to sort all posts by dates. With the later it is hard to figure out which blogs you haven't visited in a while because they've gone the way side.
Here's a little perspective of what my clean-up involved. On GFC I was following 68 blogs. I decided that 3 months of dead time and minimum of 2 posts per month would be my main criteria for unfollowing. Other obvious factors were change in blog topic (from books), deleted blogs, blogs turned private, URL switches, and those that no longer fit my taste. I spent about 30 minutes clicking, checking dates, checking average post times, and doing a quick scan of the site...that's less than 30 seconds per site! That may sound quick to judge, but you can find out a lot in 30 seconds. One thing I discovered was that I indiscriminately followed a lot of sites once upon a time...
By the end of it I wound up with 6 blogs via GFC. I consolidated about five using BlogLovin' and the six I had left were those not connected to BlogLovin'. Pretty darn good I say!
The big time sucker was BlogLovin where I followed a whopping 568 people. Honestly, I don't know how that happened. Okay, that's a not so honest statement. I have a habit (good or bad) of following most of the new blogs that I find if I think they have potential to keep going in the long haul. But I had NO idea that I was following quite that many. The problem is that I easily lose track of start-ups on BlogLovin (since you can't sort blogs by date of their last post) and I don't keep track of which ones I visit more frequently than others. Certain names are obvious, but only those who reciprocate and keep active on my blog.
I ended up going through the blogs in alpha order. By the time I made it to the C's I was down to 544. Not too bad! By "H" I had made it to 530. I finally hit under 500 by the N's. At the end of my first run through (2 hours later) I was down to 435! Not too bad for the quickie scan of the clearly vacated blogs.
Next I went for the "Do I really like the material" scan. This one was harder to do because it was obviously more time consuming to do a thorough scan of each site's material. I made sure that they were sites that I found useful and that I would recommend to others. After another 3 hours I made it down to 259! That's still a lot of blogs to follow, but that's a pretty good sort through I'd say. While that is a lot, I don't think it's too many for BlogLovin' since everyone has different posting schedules and types of posts.
I'm making a mental note to be more judicious in my following, but who knows how long that will last. As I said earlier, I love to follow new blogs to see where they go. But if they stop posting without me realizing, they get shuffled to the bottom of my feed and the ghost blogs start building up...
Do you follow a lot of blogs? Do you frequently do blog checks or do you tend to let them fall to the bottom of the list over the years?
Wow! Now that you mention it...I think I need to do some blog cleaning, too. I know there are some I am both subscribed to and also follow on Bloglovin. I'll be using your criteria to help me sort through the blogs I follow! Thanks for sharing!
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