A Little Frustrated

Ok, so I’m getting a bit frustrated here. For quite a while now I have been using this website, FeedBlitz.com, which basically allows you to subscribe to get any new posts e-mailed to you from your friends’ and family members’ blogs. At first I was happy with this free service – I set it up so that I received one e-mail with new posts from my friends’ blogs and a separate e-mail with new posts from my family’s blogs. Then I had all the new posts right in my inbox, in two neat lists, and I could look at them when it was convenient for me, without having to worry that I might have missed something if I hadn’t had time to check out everyone’s blogs for a while. So, this service is still working well, the only problem is private blogs.

Once a blog goes private, even if I am an invited reader of that blog, FeedBlitz no longer has the ability to send me an e-mail when a private blog is updated. I checked with FeedBlitz to make sure, and they said that it isn’t possible. So, I have been getting these e-mails that have a few new blog posts from friends’ and family members’ blogs, but they have a lot of blank entries that just say, “Blogger login to read,” and then I have to click on the link in the e-mail and go to each private blog and read the post there. It seems that this wouldn’t be too big of a deal, but with so many of my friends deciding to go public lately, I am getting e-mails from FeedBlitz that end up having more links to private blogs than posts. So, there’s not much reason to get those e-mails anymore – I have a list of links right on my blog, so I don’t need those e-mailed to me all the time.

I decided that there must be a better way around this. I mean, I really like the idea of keeping up to date with friends and family who have blogs, and with our stage in life right now we are doing a lot of moving around the country and so our friends and family are spread all over the place. I love to be able to catch up on their lives easily. But with so many blogs to read, if I only took the time to read through the new posts on each blog once a month, it would still take me quite a while to do so, and I would probably miss some posts here and there. That’s why I really liked the option of having all the new posts sent right to me so they were all there, waiting for a time that was convenient for me to read them.

I have several friends who have used Google Reader to keep track of blogs and other websites, so I decided that this would be a nice alternative. I could have a list of all the blog posts in one spot, and it would show me which ones I had read and which ones were new. And I have generally been pleased with Google applications, so I figured this would be a good one to use. I started to enter in all of my family members’ blogs on my Google Reader list, and then when I got pretty far down the list, I had one that wouldn’t work. It said that there was no feed for this blog. I realized that this was the first private blog that I had entered in, and that was the problem. Apparently you can’t even follow private Google blogspot blogs that you have been invited to with Google Reader. So, I’m a little frustrated that I wasted my precious time when all four of my boys were napping entering a list of blogs into Google Reader, only to find out that it’s not going to work any better than the e-mail blog subscriptions that I already have set up.

Does anyone have any suggestions for me on this. At this point I’m thinking that my only two options are to regularly click on the link for every blog and see if it has been updated since I last read it or to just decide not to be so OCD and not care if I miss a post here and there (I could do that, but I wouldn’t like it). Aargh!