Bloglines reliant

I love my Bloglines account; even if I don't read every post every day, it is one of the 2.0 tools I rely upon for news and information. Sure, there is duplication between the blogs I follow and Facebook pages where I have "become a fan," but I am comfortably technology old school enough (circa 2005) to stick with Bloglines for my feed needs. It comes as no surprise I was a unhappy to see the colorful maintenance screen this morning.

I tried again early afternoon, to no avail, then succumbed to curiosity and Googled; it seems I missed an announcement last week (4/13):

"The Bloglines Plumber will be back in action as the Bloglines undergoes some routine site maintenance from 4am PT April 22th to 1am PT April 23th. We assure you that the process will be completed quickly and all will be back to normal. Thanks for using Bloglines and we apologize for any temporary inconvenience..."

Now I am pondering my dependence on this technology and wondering why I don't have a backup plan in place with Google Reader. Maybe a better question is before the immediacy of blog updates, how did I retrieve this information?