Normally Sunday mornings are glorious self-indulgent times, relaxing. I French press my coffee, drinking the whole pot for a double-shot caffeine high before it can get cold, while I read the online editions of Sunday papers all over the world. Works so well for me, yet this morning I foolishly broke rhythm and changed my routine, deciding to wade through my feed reader instead.

So now I have a headache. Good grief, no wonder it’s gotten so hard to get people to read blogs. It’s just too much work.

Really have to do something about that, including here.

What must bloggers do to get you back, away from the social media trivialities and shortness of breath and depth on Twitter, Facebook and the like? Or have we all simply decided that depth, and blogging relationships haven’t enough return on attention for us?

My own change in rhythm this morning was because I’d spent yesterday evening tweaking the sidebar (click in and take a look if I happen to be part of your reader” let me know if you love it, hate it, or just don’t care, for all feedback is welcomed). I had two main reasons for tackling it, and the process quickly led to all kinds of changes: I brought back my list of Hawaiian values, but with tags to keep it Talking Story contained. Second, it was getting to be too much work to keep rotating those RSS feeds I used to have as a suggested blogroll, and I suspected I was hurting people’s feelings when they got rotated off. If you’d been one of those people, I still kept you on my reader, and if it makes you feel better, my exit link stats showed that very few people used my sidebar blogroll. Mostly I did, and so I figured I may as well switch everyone in my reading rotations to my feed reader, for isn’t that what it’s for, and isn’t a blog for something else?

Enter the headache.

Google Reader is new for me. I just started using it after years on BlogLines for the simple reason of wanting to keep my new MacBookPro as spare as possible — believe it or not, I rarely use Firefox anymore finding that Safari works just fine. I can get to Google Reader through my Gmail navigation and so figured I could just start sparingly” it would be fun to build a new reader!

Yeah right. It got added to so, so quickly with all the blogs I read. Adding folders didn’t seem to help, so I’m asking for your help: How do you read blogs, reading them so you still love the reading?

I’ll commit to more soul-searching on the Talking Story reading experience: I know I can always improve things here. Use my contact form if you prefer to give me your likes and dislikes here privately. Next job I’m tackling is another streamlining of the categories.

And if you use Google Reader, do you have any tips for me?

Warm, strong, and great. Even when you put it in a kiddie mug.

Photo Credit: Modified RSS Podcast Logo by Colleen AF Venable on Flickr
More about my own RSS feeds: The Care and Feeding of your Talking Story Subscription