The idea for this post comes from Dr Tanya at Salted Caramel. Thank you, Dr. Tanya. 🙂

Please see the original post: https://saltedcaramel670.wordpress.com/2020/06/08/blogging-insights-32-your-reading-habits/

1. How often do you visit the WordPress Reader?

I always use my reader. Wherever possible, I’ve disabled email notifications (it’s strange that I sometimes get them anyway) and I rarely use or check the Gmail that’s attached to WP. So, if you’re trying to contact me through WP email, leave me a comment letting me know. 🙂

I unfortunately already get about 150 work-related emails a day in addition to my personal email, so more emails? No thanks. If someone I follow has posted, the post shows up in my reader, usually, unless there is a mysterious glitch that results in an undirected “unfollow.” But, if that happens, I won’t get an email notification anyway, so …

And, an aside: isn’t that strange? Sometimes I just “unfollow” someone I’ve followed, in some cases, for years. The link seems to drop or fail or something. Or another thing is that people’s posts may suddenly stop arriving in my reader. It will occur to me that I haven’t seen someone for a bit and then I’ll go looking. Anyone else experience this?

2. What kind of blog posts are you more likely to read?

I will read anything that strikes me as interesting or humourous, and of course, I look at a lot of photographic blogs. When I first started (almost eight years ago; I can’t believe it’s been that long!), I read many blogs about narcissism. I had had a miserable (but very short) marriage to a narcissist followed by an ugly divorce, and I was doing some of my homework through reading up on people’s experiences with the narcissistic element.

It’s interesting that I now don’t read any blogs that are completely devoted to narcissism, or at least, not very often. The last blogger I followed who used to write with some regularity about narcissism stopped posting in December; she started other projects. What that tells me is that I don’t need to do that any more; I’ve moved on, and that’s partially due to the reading I’ve done here.

I recently watched the first season of Dirty John (a true story) on Netflix (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_John_(TV_series) ) and a couple of times had an intense feeling of déjà vu as I watched Debra Newell deal with the narcissistic sociopath she had married. Her experience was much, much worse than mine, but mine paralleled hers in some very important, definitive ways. I was able to predict what she should have been doing and when and found myself willing her to take action or act differently. It was an edifying viewing experience, in more ways than one.

I regularly read the blogs that I follow, so I don’t follow more blogs than I can handle. I skip around to read many single posts, however. I don’t find WP’s “Discover” to be very interesting or appealing (some of it is) and I’ve stopped taking a look at it. I used to enjoy Freshly Pressed (remember that?) much more, but it had issues too (I was floored by the poor quality that sometimes showed up there).

How about you? What are your reading habits?