Saving Grace – How Google Reader Saved My Blog!

If you don’t use a reader program to read your favorite blogs, I’m going to tell you a story that will make you rethink your decision.

It’s the story of how Google Reader saved this blog.

I like receiving blog updates via email.

I know that’s not a popular choice among the well-connected, but for me it works.  I like pulling up Leo’s latest post on ZenHabits or take a gander at SingleMomSeeking or ProBlogger on my Blackberry while warming up the car. Each of these sends out an email each time they update their blog and I’m notified.

Since I have my GMail open pretty much all day anyway, my favorite blogs are always right there.  However, a lot of people, me included on occasion, also use an RSS reader to read blog updates.

RSS readers like Google Reader, collect your favorite blog’s RSS feed in one place and when you want to catch up, all the recent posts are gathered together in an organized manner.

OK, so I’m preaching to the choir here.

Last week, I upgraded Solo-Dad to WordPress 2.8.  It melted down my post database – still haven’t figured out what happened.

I tried in vain to restore my updates. Nothing.  A whole lotta nada.

Then today I opened Google Reader to catch up on SingleMommyhood, How To Make My Blog, and of course, ProBlogger.

The first subby I came to was….you guessed it…SOLO-DAD!

There, in all their glory, were most of the lost posts I’d cried over last week.

I screamed, “Yesssss!!!!!!”   And that’s when I knew that Google Reader had saved my blog.

The value of subscribing to your own blog

Yes, subscribe to your own blog.  That way, if the unthinkable and completely possible happens, you can spend a few hours doing the old cut-n-paste shuffle instead of days shedding tears over a melted blog.  :)

Even if you might use the automatic database backup plugin like I do, that’s no guarantee that your blog will make it back to the blogosphere alive.

A partial victory

As pleased as I am about the potential to restore a number of posts that I previously thought were lost, I only began subscribing to the blog in December.  Anything earlier than December of last year is gone forever.

Still, I’m pretty pleased about how it turned out.  The only aspect of the posts that are beyond repair are the comments. Ah well, I can live with that.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some cutting-n-pasting to do!