Thursday, July 17, 2008

A Little Blog Frustration

So here's that whole viewing problems as challenges thing: when I signed up for the 2.0 challenge, I used a different e-mail address from my regular work and personal address. "This is sound advice," I thought. "Then all of my Montana Library 2.0 correspondence will be in one convenient location, and won't get mixed up with everything else. Plus, no new spam will be generated in my current accounts when I sign up for these new services. What a great idea!"

So I used my yahoo account - I automatically have one, because I've used some of yahoo's services (the Briefcase, before I go my AMAZING flash drive - death to the floppy disk!, Flickr, some groups, etc.), but I've never actually used it. All well and good.

Then, I went to set up my blog. Blogger, unfortunately, belongs to Google, so it wanted me to use my gmail account. No problem, they let you use a different account if you want to. Great! I sign up with my yahoo account, write my first post. All good.

And I went back to Google, where I have my iGoogle (which is really cool) set up with all these wonderful things I access on a regular basis. But, logging into a Google service (Blogger) with a different account logged me out of my iGoogle. Okkkaaay. Maybe I can change the address on my Blogger account. So I went back to Blogger. Nope. You can change everything but your login account. So I decided that my "problem" was actually a minor annoyance and that my solution would be to ignore it.

Yesterday, I decided to add all my classmates wonderful blogs to my Google Reader. And as I was doing that, I found a post I wanted to leave a comment on. But wait, to do that I have to log in with yahoo instead of gmail. Okay. I did that, left my comment and went back to adding blogs to Reader - except that I was still logged in under yahoo, so it saved them under that instead. Suddenly, my "minor annoyance" reverted back to "problem".

Anyway, long story - well, still long. I'm not sure I met it with the appropriate attitude of challenge versus problem, but I did find a solution. It involved inviting my gmail self to be a contributor on my yahoo self's blog, and then deleting my yahoo self as a contributor. There was much logging into this and out of that and vice versa, and much grumbling accompanied it, but I have now happily united all of my services under my gmail account, and no longer get logged out of my iGoogle.

What have I learned? Possibly that web 2.0 is meant to play together, and in attempting to separate things, I cause myself more trouble than anything else!

3 comments:

Dee Ann said...

Amen, sister! I've been dealing with this myself, though I've been battling it out with my two gmail selves. I like your solution - and intend to use it!

laurenm said...

I can tell you are an extremely intelligent and resourceful person! Thank you for sharing your creative solution to this problem. Someday maybe I'll use this kind of solution to aggregate some of my sites and services. For now, my stuff is all over the place and I keep a printed index of account information. I'm behind the curve on this...

gypsyharper said...

Well, I can't take credit for the solution, since I just found it in Blogger's help pages. Some of the tab names have evidently changed since it was written, however, so it was a little challenging to find the places they were talking about!