The Blog of Blogs

Today was the 13th and, even if it wasn't Friday, you just knew something had to go wrong.

Several years ago, I saw that there were getting to be more and more blogs being done by my VROC family. I thought it would be nice to have one location where people could check and see what was going on in the VROC blogosphere, so I started a blog of blogs. Rather than just list them, I discovered a Blogger gadget that would maintain them in the order in which posts were made. The most recently active blogs would keep moving to the top. It was slick and every time that I saw a new blog over the last few years, I added it to the list.

Today, I was doing some editing and added a test entry. When I went to delete, I accidentally selected the button that deleted the gadget instead of the individual item. You would think that there would be a confirmation dialogue for something this drastic. Something that said "You are about to delete two years of work. Are you sure you want to proceed?" But no, Blogger didn't anticipate a simple wrong keystroke and the gadget, along with all the painstakingly collected links, was gone into the ether. Without an Undo option! I am usually scrupulous about backing things up but I'm not even sure it would have been possible in this case.

So I put out the word out to VROC for blog links. And I checked the profiles of some prolific VROC bloggers to find not only their own blogs, but other ones they follow. I now have well over 100 discovered. The one problem is sheer volume. I maintain one travel blog so that would be a single brief operation to add my entire history to the list. A few others do this, too. But some of the most interesting bloggers in our circle start new ones for each separate trip or topic and it will take quite some time to add them, one by one, to the list. But I'm working on it.

A tip to novice bloggers. Blogger allows you up to 99 blogs for your user ID. I have four. Skid & Sandy On The Road (this one), Skid's Letters (to record my letters to the editor), Skid's Random Thoughts (musings that I occasionally save for posterity) and the Blog of Blogs. It will be easier for your followers to reflect on your history if you limit the number of blogs you maintain. Posterity will thank you for it. For those who have myriad different ones, they are important enough to me to spend from now until Christmas making sure the links are all collected in one place. And for all who take the time to share their lives in our common community, thank you so very much.  Keep writing.