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Blogroll keepers #3

I’ve been making an end-of-year effort to sort out my RSS subscriptions. For each feed I’m aiming to either catch up, mark it as read and intend to keep up in future, or admit defeat and unsubscribe.

In 2020 I’d like to bring some finishability to my feed reading, which involves being a bit more ruthless, and unsubscribing from things I don’t realistically read. Ideally I should be able to catch up on my feed reading each day and move on to doing other things, rather than it being a source of constant taunting about the massive number of unread items.

As a result of all that, I’ve been going through my “Tryout” folder and mostly moving the feeds into more permanent locations. So here’s a quick run-down of feeds/sites I’ve committed to reading, in no particular order. (See previous Blogroll Keepers posts, and my blogroll.)

  • Nadia Eghbal (RSS). I came across her site via Kicks Condor, who has an interview with her. A great example of “thinking in public”, with lots of interesting ideas.

  • Tom Critchlow (RSS). Startups, art, technology, blogging, and I’ve enjoyed his writing.

  • Laura James (RSS). Her week/fortnight/month notes are full of quotes and links to fascinating things she’s read and thought about, like a commonplace book. Among other things, Laura organises the Festival of Maintenance.

  • Daniel Benneworth-Gray (RSS). A book designer, so some posts about book design, and others about… lots of other interesting things.

  • Ribbonfarm (RSS). Venkatesh Rao’s site (plus other contributors) has bags of interesting and thoughtful posts about blogging, culture, identity, computing. I like the continual adding-to and refining of ideas over time in series of posts.

  • Brendan Dawes (RSS). An artist and designer doing interesting things. I don’t think we’ve met but I think I’ve at least seen him talk at one of those Conway Hall conferences (Interesting / The Story / Playful)…? Over time I suspect I’ll only be as specific about this kind of thing as, “I might have heard their name in… London? Or maybe Brighton?”

  • Anna Goss (RSS). A lead service designer at GDS whose weeknotes I very much enjoy. We met once. My memory isn’t entirely gone!

  • Ethan Hein (RSS). “A Doctoral Fellow in music education at New York University, and an adjunct professor of music technology at NYU and Montclair State University.” I’m behind on reading this and it’s the exception to my end-of-year mark-as-read rule in that I want to read those outstanding posts. Fascinating stuff about music and education and both.

  • Go Make Things – Daily Developer Tips (RSS). I don’t read many practical tech blogs because the signal-t0-noise ratio is often way off for me. But Chris Ferdinandi’s articles, focusing on writing JavaScript without third-party frameworks and libraries, is clearly written and very useful.

  • Peter King’s Football Morning in America (RSS). I wanted to read a bit more about American football, because the BBC’s two shows a week don’t allow much time for discussion and I want more background. This fits the bill – one really, really long post each week – but I haven’t been keeping up because I’m always a bit behind with my viewing and I don’t want spoilers. The weekly Football Outsiders’ Audibles at the Line (all articles RSS) is similar – weekly, long – but a bit too chatty for me.

I fear I’m going to have to unsubscribe from more older, neglected-by-me, feeds to keep up but this is a good problem to have, there being too much good stuff to read. Such a shame that “RSS is dead” isn’t it?