You’re so vain I bet you think this song is about you, don’t you?  

This quote came from a song by Carly Simon in 1972.  I don’t think of myself as being very vain, but aren’t we all vain to one degree or another?  What is vanity? According to one dictionary I have it is:  characteristic of false pride; having an exaggerated sense of self-importance.

All of us take pride in our accomplishments and rightfully so but when that we get carried away with it then it becomes a problem.  An excessive degree of vanity some say is the root of all evil.  We must all realize that for the most part we will be long forgotten soon after we leave this earth.  Most of us just don’t leave a very deep footprint on this world.

One of the places where I see my vanity surface has to do with my blogs. I look around at some of what I consider totally frivolous blogs and see that they have thousands and thousands of followers while my blogs seldom get more than a hundred views a day. How could those sites be more relevant than mine? Don’t I talk about some pretty serious issues that need addressing? I must admit that when I was doing more posts of a partisan political nature my blog visits were quite a bit higher. It is tempting to continue to do more of that but I decided to take the high road so to speak.

My “followers” increase a little every week but never enough to satisfy my vanity.  I want to be famous!  It is only when I can tamp down my false pride that saner thoughts occur. I am not trying to win friends and influence people as the old saying goes. Instead I blog for a higher purpose. I blog for an enlightened audience so to speak. I blog for quality not quantity. 🙂

Putting all this vanity stuff aside, the original purpose of this post is to give you an alternative to the Google Reader that so many use.  Google announced that they would cease that app in a few months. I have been using it for several years now so I went on the search for another app to fill that void. I found one that is even better than Google and that is Feedly.  You can import your Google Reader stuff and quickly add others as you come across them.  Then simply click the “Feedly” button in your browser and up comes snapshots of all the unread posts that you follow.  It also has the capability of saving posts you want to keep for the future.  Click on the picture to the right to try it out.

Now to connect these two seemingly unconnected discussions. I can rationalize that my “follower” count does not reflect my total number of dedicated readers on my blogs since many are probably connected via readers such as Feedly which my blogging software doesn’t account for. So, maybe I am more popular than I think. At least that is a good way of rationalizing my exaggerated sense of self-importance.