Catch Me If You Can!

This has been a super busy week for me, so I thought I would catch you all up on the things I've been doing intead of posting here.

Firstly, Autumn from The Beheld invited me to do a guest post - I was enormously flattered, given the standard of writing she puts up, and was of course delighted to oblige. It's similar to one of my previous posts about how the sex industry shaped my perceptions of presentation, and femininity, and all that good thinky stuff, so you should head on over and check it out.

I was also invited by The Peach to start a series of articles on nail polish for absolute beginners, and the first part went up on Tuesday. Those of you who missed my How To Do Nails posts way back in the way back times will probably appreciate this series, especially because I have a bunch of extra knowledge that I didn't have back then. The first post is a shopping list of sorts for what you need to start messing around with nail polish, and you can check it out here. The upcoming posts will be covering how to put polish on for best results, how to get it off, and a roundup of all my favourite Australian indie brands of polish, so keep an eye out for those.

This wasn't anything to do with me, but the news came through this week that Google will be shutting down Google Reader in June, which I am seriously uninpressed about. The official reason given is that there has been a "decline in usage" but given that there is already a petition attempting to get them to reverse their decision makes me think that perhaps it was actually more about the fact it's hard to monetise an RSS reader. For those of you who don't use them, an RSS reader is a site that saves feeds from all your favourite blogs and puts them all together in the one place, so you don't have to worry about going back to check them on a regular basis - you just open up your RSS reader, and it will tell you if there are new posts on any of the blogs you feed it.  Google Reader is the most popular of these, so I'm a bit concerned about losing readers who don't have the time or enthusiasm to switch their RSS feeds over to another reader. I decided it might be worthwhile to go through a few of the other ways you can follow this blog.

Firstly, you see the little orange box up in the top right hand corner? That's the button to get the RSS feed for this blog. Clicking on it will take you through to a page where you can choose where you want the feed to go, and from there it's pretty straightforward. However, if you don't use an RSS reader, you can also get the RSS feed for this blog into your email. If you pop your email address into the box, you'll get an email every time I put up a new post.

Alternatively, if you scroll down a little bit further you'll see a button to follow this blog on BlogLovin'. It's an RSS reader, but it's aimed at the fashion and design crowd so it's a lot prettier and easier to use than a lot of the others I've seen. At the moment, because a lot of people are attempting to find an alternative to Google Reader, some of the alternatives are incredibly slow, and some it's not even possible to join right now because they're being inundated with new users. I've had a Bloglovin account for a while now, but I managed to get my Google Reader feeds all switched over to it in one click last night, so that's where I will be reading my blogs for the foreseeable future. Anyway, if YOU want to use Bloglovin to follow this blog, just click on the big button, and it will take you through from there.

If you use Twitter, you can also follow me there - my username is @anwyn and you'll have to deal with all my ramblings in between, but I do tweet links to all my new posts here, as well as The Peach and Lacquerheads of Oz, and anyone else who will have me. 

I hope that helps you all keep track of where I've wandered off to this time a little better, and I'll be back with a more substantial post soon.