There has been a lot of talk about blogs in my sphere recently. First, Digg Reader was shut down and I was forced to transition the 40+ blogs that I follow to a new service. Around the same time Jason Kottke (of kottke.org) asked his sustaining members about their favorite blogs. He recently posted the results and included my response (link here so I can treasure this moment)!!
Let me take some more time to list of some of my favorite blogs.
Best of All time
Obviously, Jason Kottke is the best. I have been following him for probably 15 years and I enjoy his blog so much that I am a sustaining member. His blog covers the best of the internet and talks about life, technology, design, and the intersection of it all.
If you have ever been and Apple fan (and are old enough to remember when they actually were the underdogs), then you should already know about Daring Fireball. John Gruber is a prolific blogger and well know for insightful commentary on the Apple news of the day. Also, he invented Markdown. The term ‘fireballed’ refers to a website that is essentially DDOS’d when DF shares a link to it.
The Swiss-Miss blog by Tina Roth Eisenberg is another favorite. It is focused around design and creative work. She shares a ton of inspirational videos and cool products that I wish I could buy.
The last in this category is the Signal-v-Noise blog by 37signals. This is group that develops Basecamp. They are a 100% remote company and a huge inspiration for working in tech and loving your job.
Niche Favorites
Sacha Chua is an amazing blogger. Her style of writing is stream-of-thought, but she goes straight for the deep thoughts about how to improve her (and her family’s) life. She is a prolific contributor the Emacs community and includes a weekly roundup of Emacs news.
Autostraddle is a website for the LGBTQ community. This blog includes a ton of helpful resources for allies and helps me understand the community and important issues better.
The Stone Soup is the only blog on food that I follow. Jules teaches you how to cook with the ingredients you have, so that you understand how to assemble a meal rather than just follow a recipe. Plus, everything I have ever made from her is delicious.
My favorite tech-life blogger is Cate. Her style is incredibly intimate and real; I connect with so much that she writes about. My favorite project of hers are the love letters from airports (with the Technically Speaking newsletter as a close second).
A Few More
Penelope Trunk covers career management.Kate Murphy, Natasha the Robot, Julia Evans (also featured by Kottke), Beth Andres-Beck, Domesticated Engineer, and Kate Heddleston all blog about working in technology (software). And the Fancy Beans blog has left the tech industry behind and is FIRE. The Programming is Terrible blog has one of my favorite posts of all time: Write code that easy to delete.
The Kid Should See This: links to great youtube videos.Tools and Toys links to some interesting products and includes interesting links in their Friday roundup. On the more reflective side of things, zenhabits is quite popular and PatrickRhone is very personal.Irreal is an Emacs blog which posts daily, usually short snippets about Emacs or what is going on the community.The Loop and Pixel Envy are good tech and Apple blogs (see also Matt Gemmell, Derek Sivers, Dustin Curtis).
RSS App
The final piece of the puzzle is actually reading the feeds. In the very early days I would manually click on bookmarks (that was well before the iPhone). Then, I was a huge fan of Safari’s built in RSS reader. When that shut down I moved to Digg. I loved Digg reader since it synced across both an iPhone app and a website.
Currently, I’m using Inoreader. They just released a major update to the iOS app and I am really liking the new design.
While I do like the built-in ability to bookmark or save an article for later, that really backfires when the service shut down. I had about 400 saved articles in Digg, of which 300 or so made it to my pinboard.in account.
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