Change is in the Wind

I felt ridiculously rejected! For several months, my blog had appeared on another blogger's (let's call her Millie) list of links and because I admired her and her blog so much, I took a strange pride in being included on Millie's list. And then one day she apparently cleaned house, and my blog no longer appeared in her sidebar. It all felt a little bit like the time about twenty years ago that my daughter walked into her third grade classroom and there was a birthday party invitation on every girl's desk except hers. (Yes, I can still tell you the name of that mean, rotten, third grade girl -- you hurt my kid, you're on my list for ever!)

Over the years of blogging, I've followed so many different blogs. Some eventually seem to evaporate and others say goodbye and close down (don't get me started on how much I've been missing Mrs. Goodneedle, just don't get me started). Sometimes a blog on my sidebar will change its tone and I'll find I'm not really that interested in what the blogger has to say any longer. This happened a couple of times, for instance there was the time that a quilter began sharing very personal aspects of her life -- I felt uncomfortable, as if I'd opened a door and found her standing there naked! I deleted her from my sidebar, hoping she found a good therapist who helped her learn about boundaries. Each time I delete a blog, I flash back to the time I was deleted by Millie, and hope I'm not hurting someone else's feelings. And then I get a grip and say, "Nancy, get over yourself already. Why would someone care if she was on your sidebar?"

I've got a whole 'nuther list of blogs in my "Favorites," ones I check regularly but that I don't need to know immediately when they are updated.

The string in the sidebar has become unwieldy. And just in the nick of time, I've learned about Bloglovin, one of many ways to follow blogs relatively effortlessly. And I spent some time the other night listing all of the Quilters in my sidebar with Bloglovin. I'll still be reading them all, but through Bloglovin, where I believe all of the updates will come in one place, rather than clicking individually as I see blogs rise to the top of the update list. Next step will be to plug the "Favorites" blogs into Bloglovin. Oh, the tidiness! Oh, the organization!

While I was writing this, it occurred to me that perhaps Millie didn't reject me and my blog after all. Perhaps, instead, she subscribed to a reader of some sort. She was always way ahead of me technologically.

I'm mentioning this whole thing because there are a couple of blogs that I frequent where I regularly click on folks in their sidebars. And in case there are folks doing that from here, I don't want you to feel left out in the cold when I take down my list of quilters' links. Which will likely happen by the end of this week, once I've had an opportunity to really test Bloglovin.

'Kay?