We received a comment the other day from Melanie telling us she’d added a link to our blog on her own and would we return the favour. Our few links are to people we either know in person or have come to know through our blogs, so it seemed a bit like cold calling, which I have to say put me off a bit. When I clicked on her blog, I saw that she had a huge amount of links, seemingly a bit impersonal and so I was even less enamoured. HOWEVER, I read her blog and I’m very impressed. She’s a voracious blogger and so, although you might struggle to keep up with her output, if you scan through her blog, you’re bound to find something of interest, from recipes, through personal tales of successes and failures pursuing her family’s efforts to be “green”, to technical information on how to keep bees or flush your toilet with collected rainwater. And she writes well: sincere, with good style and amusing wit. We’re certainly going to keep an eye on her blog.
In an email back to me, to say “thank you” for adding a link to her blog, she introduced me to a new term, saying that she enjoys “being part of the self-sufficiency blogsophere”. While "Cyberspace" might be a real word, my spellchecker doesn’t like “blogosphere” but I’m sure it will end up in the English Oxford Dictionary eventually!
We look at several blogs regularly now, so I thought it time to install a web feed reader. My chosen one is called Shrook . This is specifically for Apple Mac users though there are many others about (type in RSS, Atom, feed reader, news reader, etc., into Google or another search engine to find them). I’ve loaded in the web addresses (URL) of all the blogs we monitor and it alerts us each time they post something new.
(This last bit is specifically for my parents, Keith and Liz, who’ve only recently become computer literate with the help of my sister, Ros, and use the blog and emails to keep up to date with our lives here in Brittany. 
Use the mouse (see photo!) to move the pointer until it’s over the word “Melanie”, highlighted in green above in the text of this blog. See that it changes into a white-gloved pointy finger thing. Left click on the mouse, and that should take you to her blog. You can use the same principle to look at all the links I put in my blogs! Use the back arrow in the top left hand corner of the screen to take you back to where you were.)
Next blog, I'll be telling you about the visit of a expert tree surgeon to our land, tidying up large pines and doctoring aged oaks.
