New Links, Bloglines and how I accidentally helped someone

There's some new folks in the links section. People I've been reading and what-not. Click 'em if you wanna.

Which brings me to the devil's tool I've been using lately: Bloglines. Basically they just collect feeds for you and you can read all the sites you like at once, from within their page. At first, I marvelled at the convenience and ease of use.

But I noticed something else: Bloglines makes it far less likely that I will post a comment to a blog I read. You can't do that without going to the site, and since I'm just reading the feed, I keep thinking of things to comment but then then not going to the actual page and posting the thing I wanted to say.

The title of this post was almost "Bloglines begets bad blogging," as I like commenting on other blogs, and consider it a part of keeping up this one, and I haven't been doing that so much these days. Plus I'm robbing my colleagues of site visits, if they track those, and it seems like most do. So I think Bloglines has to go.

I had an Argentinian visitor recently who was referred off a Google search for "'preparation for the funeral' cezanne location." This directed them to the post I did from London about the Cezanne exhibit at the National Gallery. I think the painting is still there, that the exhibit is still up. It looks as though someone wanted to know where the painting was, and that they found reasonably current information about their question from my blog.

So that's nice. I'm like Wikipedia now. Chock full o'facts.

To keep this public service active, I will now reply to those of you who are referred by queries as to why Nyquil® changed their formula:

Nyquil® changed their formula because the old version contained an ingredient which people could easily convert into crystal meth. Seriously. I don't think this is a great reason. They didn't outlaw any of the readily-available huffing materials when people started abusing them, so why I have to suffer to make it a little harder to make an illegal drug is beyond me. It's not like they changed the formula and crystal meth disappeared. If it had, I'd have been all for the switch. But Nyquil doesn't do what it used to, and I've sadly abandoned its use myself. Now I use whiskey.

It's pretty clear to me that I'm blogging right now to avoid work on my novel. So I'll get back to what I'm supposed to be doing right now, and leave you nice people alone.