Armaggedon's coming!

All(the)top Mages in one place…

OK, maybe not ALL the top mages, but the list is growing on Alltop.

in addition to those already on the list…

• Larisa’s Pink Pigtail Inn has hit the list.
• Zupa’s Automagica! has hit the list.
• Krizzlybear’s Frost is the new Black has hit the list.
• and, ohhh what’s this… so have I! (Ok, maybe I nominated myself.. but hey…)

So what is it, and why bother?

When reading blogs you basically have 4 options.

1) Stumble across them and bookmark them.

I used to do this.  I found one good one, and there was a Blogroll.  I followed that and found more.

Each time I found one, I would bookmark it.

Then I would religiously check the page… for most blogs for no reason, as there was no update.

This got a little tiring, waiting for pages to open, only to find nothing had changed.

A good place to start browsing for Blogs of interest, is the Twisted Nether Blog List.

2) Subscribe in a reader (ie: Google Reader).

This is much easier than it seems (if you are a bit technophobic), you can read feeds through things like Google Reader, Yahoo, Firefox as well as in dedicated feed readers.

Here you have got a couple of options.

a) Subscribe to an Aggregate feed, such as Warcraft Bloggers

This will give a selection (defined by who has signed up to have their feeds aggregated and distributed) of blog feeds.

• The plus is you get to read blogs you may otherwise miss, or not read.
• The minus is you get to read blogs you may otherwise miss, or not read.

b) Selectively subscribe to various blogs.

Using the feed links, you can subscribe to the feeds from the sites you choose to read.

Posts

Comments (Yes, you can subscribe to my comments… I am sure you really want to… Not!)

Feedburner Feed

On some sites (Blogger designed) you will see Subscribe to: Posts (Atom) at the bottom of the page. (This one leads to the feed for Automagica!)

• The plus is you don’t have to wade through the noise of other blogs that you wouldn’t otherwise read.
• The minus is, well it’s like listening to your favorite CDs – Yeah you love it, but you may never get to hear any new music, or in this case, stumble across new blogs.

3) Email subscriptions

Feedburner Feed

Many feeds allow you to subscribe to email updates rather than reader updates.  Feedburner is the one that comes immediately to mind.

4) Alltop

Alltop is sort of a mix of the aggregate news reader and the bookmarked pages, with a little bit of selectivity thrown in.

• When blogs hit the Alltop site they are displayed – the only choice you have in what blogs appear is that you can nominate your favorites.
• You can just keep the one page bookmarked, and pop in and see what the new posts are on the listed blogs.
• You can choose to close (really minimize) those blogs you aren’t interested in following (or are following in other ways), but they are still there if you want to have a random scan one day when you have too much time on your hands.

Just so you know, you can follow Armaggedons Coming in all (or any might be the better option) of these methods.

• You can bookmark me!
• You can read my blog amongst the blogs in Warcraft Bloggers
• You can subscribe to my feed via the standard WordPress feed (which also allows you to subscribe to comments), or via Feedburner.
• Which means, that via Feedburner you can subscribe to email updates rather than reader updates.
• And now, you can bookmark Alltop and check out my latest, as well as some of the finest of the other blogs “around town”

Gnomer and Out!