So how did it go? Pretty good, I guess. Bad RSS-withdrawal pains on Saturday and Monday, lessening as the week went on. A lingering sense that I was “out of the loop.” Some agonizing slow hours on the reference desk. But nothing worse.

I read a whole entire book (the quite good Black Swan Green, which I reviewed for our book review site, Bookends); I didn’t try and read feeds at the same time I fed my baby; I didn’t stay up late messing around on Second Life, etc.

Did I cheat? Yeah, a little. I checked my blog stats from time to time to see if anyone was still visiting. (Between traffic for the guess the book by its LCSH game and Steven Cohen’s nice shout out, the day after I “signed off” was See Also’s biggest day ever in terms of page loads. I should go away more often.) I looked at web pages that people forwarded to me via email and stuff like that.

But I held fast to my main principles: no feeds and no time-killing on the web. My whole point wasn’t to see if I could go for a week without the web, but to try and help establish healthier patterns for using the web. Now that I’m back, my plan is to read feeds three times a day at most (morning, afternoon, evening), and no web surfing after 10PM.

Now I’m itching to get back to work here. I have a small backlog of things I want to write about, so I expect to post more often than usual while catching up. Also, if you haven’t looked at the LCSH game recently, take another look, as the commenters have come up with some great additions.

We’ll see how it goes. Now, if you will excuse me, I have 729 links awaiting me in my feed reader.