I promise not to unsubscribe to items with fair judgment. Each blog needs to argue its case: why they deserve to sit on my reader and be read at night when Daniel goes to bed, along with blogs that I love. I have to be careful, I might miss out on something great: something that will knock me off my senses, inspire me to go back on track when I feel like procrastinating, give me an epiphany of some sort, or just entertain me for the day. So I run my eyes — without batting my eyelashes — through my reader list: from top to bottom, from left side to the right side. I am overwhelmed once again. Too much information, too little time. No wonder I feel this way, I have like 200 blogs in my list. Two hundred blogs!!! How did I accumulate all that?

My mind flashes back to the time when I spent hours upon hours at the stationery section of SM: it has to be one of the best parts of SM, second only to the clothes and trinkets section. I was poking around stacks of neatly arranged notebooks, envelopes, and stationery sets. I was always attracted to beautiful things. I absolutely adored pretty and fragrant Korean-made stationery sets that I always end up buying a truckload and looking at them for hours. They’re my guilty pleasures and I feel good when I see them–such beautiful illustrations, pastel and bright colors, friendly to the nostrils, elegant, cute, yadda yadda. I have countless pink notebooks and stationery sets that I keep for years only to realize that there’s no way I’ll write on them all. Not when there’s Microsoft word and Gmail. Not when I want a reply right away.

I feel exactly the same way with my reader. I feel that I accumulated too much that I don’t know what to read anymore. So, without further ado, let me get started.

I’m definitely keeping those blogs with really nice pastel-colored photos and short, meaningful entries. I love photos as much as I love makeup. I carry my camera everywhere I go, just in case I find something interesting to capture. I love looking at life, and capturing it.

So, moving down the list, I see some food blogs. I love food and I have invested so much time familiarizing myself with all kinds of herbs, noddles, and cheese. And I spend so much time in the kitchen, whipping something nice and tasty for my family. I take offense when some people casually quip that I cannot cook. That’s like, ten years ago when I lived in a dorm at UP where we couldn’t even heat-up noodles inside the room; I fell in line to get food from the concessionaire and they were not pleasing to taste at all: either they were bland or over-seasoned, or just plain awful, you’d rather drink water than thrust them down your throat. Can you imagine how deprived I was of good food? Four years! Anyway, I was totally bowled over and had a sudden change of heart the first time I saw Top Chef– that’s when I fell in-love with different kinds of cuisines that I am willing to go far for them.

Now, I treat food with so much respect. And I don’t just eat it, I savor and celebrate it. To delicious meals and beyond. Sometimes I challenge my husband to a taste test, which always results to eating more. So, yes, nobody’s touching my favorite food blogs.

Then there’s a row of technology and Web 2.0 blogs. One of them is my favorite, Mashable. Google Analytics blog? I don’t remember reading a single entry from it. I’m keeping Mashable and letting go of analytics. I have to keep myself abreast with the latest news. And speaking of the latest news, Twitter gets new $100M funding from multiple investors. I should resurrect my Twitter account, pronto!

And why on earth did I subscribe to Craigslist? Unsubscribe.

And like most women who read Vanity Fair and Vogue, I subscribe to Elle Magazine’s fashion blog. Those dresses at London Fashion Week that leaves you looking, wanting, and yearning… and reaching out for your credit card in a seamless way, like you always do when you are in a boutique and you feel, without a doubt, that you and those nice pair of purple boots belong together. Then you picture yourself strutting in them, all eyes on you, and you feel great. These dresses, as I look at them for 10 minutes now, must be delicately handmade with contrasting textures and flirtatious cuts. Who doesn’t want to wear them? Next.

Traveling to Hong Kong feeds, unsubscribe. What I get are politics-related blogs anyway.

Blogs that conduct daily quizzes, give out gifts, and publish daily promo codes, unsubscribe.

Mommy blogs that don’t talk about motherhood at all, unsubscribe.

Fun posts, retain. I need them when I feel down, which only happens when there’s tragedy of whatever kind.

And those travel blogs are definitely keepers. Sherman’s Travel is the best.

Blogs that don’t get updated for more than a month, unsubscribe.

Forty more blogs that I never read, unsubscribe.

Blogs about their daughters (with beautiful photos of them in pretty, flowery dresses), unsubscribe. (These remind me that I need to have a daughter…and I am not ready yet.)

My friends’ blogs, retain. (I will commit bloody murder if I do otherwise.)

A French blog? I don’t read French. Unbscribe.

There. I successfully let go of 160+ blogs from my reader. That’s a lot of junk. I feel so much better now. I just have enough blogs to read and follow…and I mean really read and follow. Like reading and looking at the authors’ lives from afar; like playing Sims, except that I don’t have to feed them, make them fall in-love, or report them to the Department of Welfare for abandoning their toddler. I am a mere reader here trying to visualize what they are going and have gone through. And I love it that way.

Cheers to an organized reader!

My earliest blogs were on the defunct Blog-city, which lasted for three years. It enjoyed its own level of fame and had a loyal following from all over the world, mostly amateur poets and lyricists. I blogged anonymously as I always dreamt of unfiltered and candid entries. My blog had no major drama and consisted mainly of posts on childhood memories, everyday mundaneness, and my life away from home. I also tried my hand in poetry, which eventually led to my first poetry book to be published.

As days passed and as the number of my readers grew exponentially, I had to look for a blogging platform that allowed layout customization. Blogdrive came to the rescue. By then, I was a law student at the Ateneo. My blog was my cushion and my lonesome ally on many nights at Starbucks (it was when most law students in my school spent hours upon hours at coffee shops) — I was able to vent out frustrations and disappointments in cyberspace while trying to remain incognito. It was cathartic to criticize my professors and the system. My words wanted to break free so badly and when they did, they were unstoppable. I had legions of readers (mostly law students) who followed my entries on a daily basis. Blogging was in a totally different spectrum as writing case digests and it offered a secure place for a law student’s deeper reverie.

The increasing need to expand and modify my blog had always been my major concern. When Google acquired Blogger, I thought of giving it a go. Blogger didn’t have nice themes then so I took the road of customizing my own pages. On Blogger I wrote memories from childhood, odes to love and loved ones, proses, and more poems scribbled at the university library. Most times I wrote vaguely, which added mystery to anonymity and left readers wanting for more. But I didn’t write for them, I wrote out of the need to write. Eventually, I became progressively more attached to my blog that it was painful to let it go.

In 2005, I fortuitously discovered the world of pro-blogging. It was when mastered the nook and cranny of professional blogging, thanks to my mentor Darren Rowse. I had international advertisers and affiliates on my blogs so I had to place primordial importance on their brands when writing entries. It was when I shifted from writing personal entries to informative articles. When writing, I had to take into consideration keywords density and optimized paragraphs for search engine rankings. I also became one of the pioneer SEO specialists in the Philippines— I analyzed trends in web traffic, its sources, and how to improve traffic conversions. I made websites rank first (or at least on the front page) on Google for their chosen keywords. My SEO services were contracted by big companies in the US and Europe, which eventually led me to put up my very own Internet and new media company. Today we have several employees who work for us and have a steady flow of international clients.

In 2006, I became a blogging mentor. I released an e-book that teaches ordinary people and stay-at-home moms to earn money on the Internet. It was sold on Clickbank and grossed more than I asked for. One of my “students” became a widely successful beauty blogger and the most in-demand makeup artist in the Philippines because of the popularity of her beauty blogs. Because of blogging, she achieved financial independence and was able to travel abroad (traveling abroad is luxury for Filipinos). Her makeup blog is also internationally recognized and a favorite among makeup companies, beauty entrepreneurs, and manufacturers. Now, she is taking Singapore by storm.

These days, I just blog for myself while running our businesses and managing our pool of talented people. I write about important milestones in our lives and random things that spark my interests. I love editing our video clips (there are A LOT of them!) and publishing them on our’s and Daniel’s blog. I’m also in the process of publishing photography books in December or January.

I intend to blog for as long as my servers have space to host our entries. I own a hosting company so that means I would be blogging indefinitely.

I love blogging. I wouldn’t have lasted 11 years if I didn’t enjoy it in the first place. I’ve met great friends through blogs and still continue to communicate with them. Blogs are also a great way to send updates, photos, and videos to friends, relatives, and family members who live in other cities and countries.