There Are Certain Advantages to Google Reader

Last Thursday, my computer died.  Completely.  EVERYTHING on the hard drive was gone without so much as a puff of smoke.  My pictures, my accumulated patterns, my files, my documents.  I had been pretty good about backing up all my files on a thumb drive, but in the past couple of months I had gotten lax, and I found, to my chagrin, that the last time I backed up anything was sometime in June.  June!

I discovered two good things, though.  Since Google Reader is web-based all the blogs on my list were still there.  Yippee!  (My Bloglines list is gone forever.)  I also found out that all the pictures I've published on my blog are stored on-line, so they are still intact. Relief!

One more reason to move everything over to Google Reader.

And another advantage:  with Google Reader you can set it up so that blogs written in foreign languages are automatically translated within the reader, saving you from having to pull up the translator each time you want to read the blog.  Now, the translator is not the best; it is often clumsy and a bit surreal, but it at least gives you some idea of what the blog writer is saying.