Blogging About Blogging

 Those with a blog on Blogger have probably seen the following message on their post page:

>FollowByEmail widget (Feedburner) is going away

You are receiving this information because your blog uses the FollowByEmail widget (Feedburner).
Recently, the Feedburner team released a system update announcement , that the email subscription service will be discontinued in August 2021.

After August 2021, your feed will still continue to work, but the automated emails to your subscribers will no longer be supported. If you’d like to continue sending emails, you can download your subscriber contacts. Learn how>

However, if you are a reader of blogs you probably know nothing about this. If you've depended on getting a blog notice in your e-mail to know when the blogs you follow have a new post, this is pertinent to you. You will no longer receive an e-mail link to this or any other blog on Blogger. We'll still be here -- but you'll have to come find us. Not a big deal, I guess. If you have any interest, you may remember -- or not -- to check in. That's fine. I get it. I've been writing chiefly for myself and a couple select people that I know still check in (you know who you are! ((HUGS)))

But this news is still kinda sad to me. I guess I'm seeing it as rather, the death-knell of the old blogging days -- or at least a vote of no-confidence. It's no longer worth  Blogger's trouble to support our automatic e-mail links -- because blogging is not the thing any more, not for personalized lifestyle or entertainment blogs, anyway. The fast food media (Twitter, Facebook, etc) has taken over to the point where folks' tastes no longer appreciate -- and certainly don't go out of the way to find -- gourmet communication like blogs. 😏 ==sigh== It is sad. I miss the old days when there was a lively network of Catholic homeschool blogging Moms -- and like-minded readers of  these blogging Moms. I learned so much from my fellow Blog-Mom-warriors and benefitted
tremendously from the support system of blogging. It was a good thing. But the days of thought-provoking, well-crafted posts of more than a dozen-odd words, from regular people -- not career bloggers, mind you, with entertaining side-bars and lists and memes and interactive links -- all safe places to wax eloquent (or not), to speak our minds and our opinions, to joke around, and to share the news of our families -- have been replaced by Big Tech-owned platforms of swift communication which are fed into marketing and political algorhythms for tracking purposes and subject to censorship and "shaming" if our beliefs don't line up with the party line.

I have to add that the loss of numbers we bloggers may see by losing the e-mail links doesn't bother me much, but the fact that our culture has changed so much that -- not only do the majority of people never read real books anymore, but Facebook and Twitter have taken over the blogging universe and it's barely been noticed. This worries me for humanity (this and many other things). Can our brains no longer process more than the soundbites permitted by Big Tech? 

Again I ==sigh=====

Who knows, though? People are waking up to the undependability (and stupidity) of the status quo; maybe there'll be a rebellion! I'm told that the rumors of the death of blogging have been greatly exaggerated, and that there's hope yet --  so I'm going to give it the "old college try" again (as opposed to the new college try). I've decided to try to get on a better roll of typing out posts three or four times a week as a protest against the zapping of our e-mail notifications -- and a contribution to the world of words not dictated by the Left. No promise, of course, that I'll come up with anything profound to write about... (You should know better than that!) But, I would like to keep my old blog alive, whether anyone comes around to read it or not. It's a great place to "log" thoughts and family pictures at the very least. Someday my grandchildren might like to look through all this! Who knows? (Gosh, I'd LOVE to read a blog that my parents or grandparents had written back in the day!)

Anyway -- since there will no longer be automated links, I will be happy to send out links to you directly if you are interested in getting a reminder. I'll try, anyway! Let's see how I do... 😉 Leave me your e-mail address in the combox -- or e-mail me directly and I'll add you to the list! Contact me at davisfarm (written out like that) + the number eleven in digits + @gmail.

*** Update: As of a couple days ago, Blogger changed their message to read something along the lines of: your readers who have already signed on for e-mail notifications will still get notifications -- but we will no longer support this function. So... Hmmm... Either they changed their minds -- or just needed to clarify what they meant all along? Who knows? Maybe they got negative feedback over the decision and decided to cut their losses? Anyway, I guess this means that the notifications will still hit your inboxes if you have signed up for this -- but if there is a problem, don't go to Blogger looking for a solution. OK. No biggie. I'm glad they haven't removed the service completely, regardless!