For a good few years I’ve been using Livejournal as a feed reader, with the idea being that if I was reading what my friends were up to anyway, I might as well intersperse it with news and other things that interested me.
Fast forward a few years, and I realise that over 95% of what I get through LJ comprises of feeds from other websites. So this weekend I’ve been setting up my Google Reader account to pull in every single unauthenticated feed I currently view through LJ, as well as feeds of every website I visit at least once a day (including a few from Facebook which deserve a post of their own at some point due to the pain of getting them working). The theory is that I will be able to access most of what I want to read in one place, and that when I’m doing my daily trawl of interesting things I won’t get distracted by memes, games and other less educational content.
Of course, I have no intention of leaving LJ and Facebook behind (just yet). I’ll just be using them for their intended purpose rather than trying to shoehorn them into directions they were not meant to go.