The sun is setting on "Brian Blogs in Brooklyn"

I believe the end of an era is approaching. As you may have heard, Alicia and I will be returning to live in Minnesota. Given that this blog is entitled "Brian Blogs in Brooklyn," I've got two options.

1) Rename the blog.

2) Retire the blog.

Well, I suppose there's a third option: I could always move to Brooklyn Park, MN. But that just seems silly.

To be fair, I certainly could just rename the blog. But I really like the name of this blog. I think it has captured (even if only through a sprinkling of posts) my life in New York City. I think this blog has given my family a window into my life they couldn't have seen any other way. More than letter writing or telephone calls, this blog allowed me to actually post photos of the life Alicia and I carved out of Brooklyn for ourselves. Retiring this blog just seems to be a natural last step as we set sail towards Minnesota.

But never fear, I'm not out of New York City yet. And you can bet good money that I've got a few good posts brewing in my mind. There's definitely a New York City Rant in the works, plus photos of our move.

And just as my previous website http://jhinra.googlepages.com/ continues to tell the story of my life in Duluth and the move to New York, so too will this blog float on in the ocean of the internet.

I've returned the blog to it's old theme, since it might as well finish the way it started almost two years ago. Be sure to check back over the next few weeks while Alicia and I pack up everything and get more and more excited to move to Minnesota. I'm sure it'll be a lot of good reading.

Google Reader Backlash

I'm feeling upset about Google Reader lately. For those of you who don't know, Google Reader is an RSS reader that acts like an email inbox for the various things you read across the internet. You tell Google Reader "I'd like to be sent copies of everything so-and-so website publishes." Google Reader then keeps an eye on the so-and-so website, grabbing a copy of every new article. When I decide to sit down and read Google Reader, I've got a copy of all the new articles around the internet.

The problem with Google Reader is that it send you everything. You get every single article published on a particular website. This can result in about 20 to 30 a day, depending on the source. That's overwhelming. And even worse, I don't typically want to read 20 or 30 articles from the same source. I've really started to burn out reading a few of my favorite websites.

Much worse, a lot of the bigger internet blogs have engineered their feeds to make it difficult to read. Nowadays, they always include ads. Much worse, occasional websites won't let Google Reader copy the whole article.  As a result, I've got to actually visit the website to read the article.

So, every day, I've got 100 things waiting for me to read in Google Reader.  I've got to manually click through each one. Even if it's just a simple click to indicate that I don't want to read the article, it's still more work than I've been willing to do.

I hate to admit it, but I think I'm done with Google Reader. I think I'm going back to manually surfing websites I'd like to read.