A bloglovin'/Google Reader update

I've written a number of educational posts on these issues.

Click here to see each of them.

First - in answering an email question, it became apparent to me that not everybody knows what Google Reader is.  Let me tell you what it is NOT - if you are reading your blogs in blogger/blogspot - you are not using Google Reader.  Google Reader is a separate program.  So if I were you - I'd stay where you are until the dust settles.


Second, if bloggers are moving to bloglovin', you do not have to go there to continue to follow them.  Choose the blog reader that you like and that works for you - read in blogger/blogspot, go to feedly, go to bloglovin' - that's your preference - you can read any blog in the reader you choose.


Third, an important update on a bloglovin' problem:

There are blogs that can't be found in bloglovin' even though these blogs use blogger like so many of us and the blogs are found by Google Reader and feedly.  

(Some people are believing that you have to sign up for bloglovin' so that others can read you in bloglovin' - not true - so that is not the problem here.)

A blog friend reported that her blog was one that got "lost" and I got this wild idea to see how big this problem was.  I imported all of my Google Reader info into bloglovin'.  It turns out eight of all the blogs I read didn't import into bloglovin'!!.  Six of those actually let me add them manually - after I went to the work to figure out which were missing - YUCK.  But two of them are seriously broken.  For your information - because you most likely read them too - the two blogs that don't work are:

Always Playing with Paper - the talented Lesley Croghan and the home of Merry Monday

GIBMISS - the wonderful Sylvie who takes all of her pictures using her Gibraltar ocean view in the background!

FYI - if I comment on your blog with any regularity, 

you are in my list of blogs 

so I have double-checked you and you work!!

I'm not trying to insult bloglovin' because the simple fact is that all of these Google Reader replacements are frantically programming to accommodate everybody who is moving over and they are all having issues, but I am really upset for these ladies because:

1.
Bloglovin' didn't give any warnings that they were lost if you did an import from Google Reader.  Their followers do NOT know that they lost them.  Bloglovin' really needed to say "oops...some of your blog feeds can't be read by bloglovin'".

2.
They can't currently be added manually - you just plain and simple can't get them in bloglovin'

3.
Bloglovin's customer service only speaks techie.  We don't speak techie.  They say the rss feed isn't working correctly and you should contact your blog portal (which they say isn't blogger???) then they say try feedburner which is another place that only speaks techie!!  (My son's high school web design teacher is trying to translate for us!)


I will let you know when there is an answer - so you can re-add these wonderful blogs and any others that might be lost.

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If you have moved to bloglovin' and imported your blogs from Google Reader - I would STRONGLY recommend that you check that all of your favorites came over!!!

If you have the same experience that I did, you can add a bunch of them back to bloglovin' manually - you just have to find them first.

If you are going to check - let me give you a few tips, because I learned a lot of hard lessons when I checked my blogs this morning - it took me forever.  Bloglovin' made some strange decisions when they designed their Google Reader import:

The short version - bloglovin' does not bring all the blogs over in the same folders or under the same names that you had them in in Google Reader!!!

The details -

1. Bloglovin's first priority is "blogger-following".  Those are the people that you clicked the "follow" button on.  When you click that follow button, those blogs show up in your blogger/blogspot dashboard and you could read from there.  The problem with putting this first priority is that bloglovin' then does not import the folder that you used in Google Reader.   If you think blogs are missing from a one of your Google Reader assigned folders, check bloglovin's "blogger-following" category they may be there!!  (You can clean this up by clicking on each blog and changing its category.)

2. Bloglovin' seems to be pulling "original" information in a couple of ways.

          a. Original blog names - if a blog has a newer name, it came over with its old name.

          b. Original folders - if you put a blog into a folder in Google Reader, and them moved it to a different folder, it comes over under the first folder.

So it's a bit of a hide-and-seek game - hopefully these hints will help!!