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Are you really really really sure you want to unsubscribe?

Nope this isn't a post about gaming but about blogging or rather about using a reader to subscribe to other folks blogs.

Up to about a year ago I didn't bother with a reader, I just had a folder of favourites stored in Firefox and a single right click opened the whole lot in tabs. This became unwieldy when the number of blogs I keep an eye on went much into double figures so I started to use a reader service to simplify things.

Without doing any research I plumped for Google reader because it seemed to be easy to use and because it appeared to integrate seamlessly into Blogger and into my iGoogle home page.

It works pretty much as advertised. Each day I log in see a list of recent blog posts, so far so good. Problems arise however when I try to do a bit of maintenance. I go into Google reader and am presented with a list of my subscriptions. I hit the "manage subscriptions button" and proceed to add new blogs and remove those which I no longer wish to follow. The list is updated and all seems good. However when I come back the next day I find that not all my changes have been remembered. The new blogs I add are there all right but the ones I trim refuse to go away. The list keeps growing and growing and I can never permanently un-subscribe to any blogs!

My current working hypothesis is that this arises because the integration between Blogger, Google Reader and iGoogle is not as good as it should be and that deleting a blog from Google reader does not remove it from the other two spots and they in turn add the deleted blog back into Google reader on next log in. Its like a self replicating computer virus. I am going to test this hypothesis by manually deleting all occurrences of a blog in each place and see if I can finally unsubscribe to something.
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Comments

Starburn said…
I use netvibes.com - also an online reader, but no problems to report so far unsubscribing and the like - would recommend taking a look :)
8:47 pm
mbp said…
Thanks Starburn, I will look into it.

Deleting the blogs everywhere did work in the end by the way. Its just a tedious thing to ave to do.
8:47 am
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