Blogs I follow using RSS
Published on under the IndieWeb category.
When I started working on my thermal printer project, I decided that I would start following blogs on RSS again. I wanted to stay up to date with some bloggers whose work I enjoyed and RSS was the best way to do so.
While I have followed people on RSS before and stopped because it was hard to keep up with my feed, the thermal printer introduced something new that has kept me on the RSS wagon: a physical feed that I will only see once per day. I can check on Feedly but I don’t really do that. I often forget to check on my RSS feed but my daily update, which prints the titles of posts that have been published in the last day, is printed every morning so I cannot miss new posts.
This got me thinking about the idea of having a “blogroll.” Blogrolls are pages where you list the blogs that you follow. I like this idea because it helps people discover other website owners. I have scrolled through a number of blogrolls in the past. Today I’m happy to announce my own blogroll that will reside in this post.
This blogroll might never be updated again or I may keep it up to date. I’m not sure. For now, however, the list of links below are the blogs whose content I have appreciated in the past enough to include in my RSS feed. I get a print out of the titles of new posts from these creators each day. Some days there are very few posts, others I get close to five posts. I don’t always read the actual posts but I sometimes make a mental note to read one if a title sticks out.
I do not read every post from these creators but I like staying up to date on new content from bloggers. There are even a few YouTube channels above. For instance, James Hoffmann posts YouTube videos that I really enjoy so I subscribed to his YouTube RSS feed so I can get a printed notification in my daily update when he posts a new video.
For all of you techies out there who wanted to know how I put this list together, long story short I exported an OPML file from Feedly which contains all of my feeds. I use Feedly as my RSS reader. I then wrote a simple program that parsed the file and turned the entries into markdown, which is what let me make the list above without having to manually copy dozens of links. You can see the script I wrote on GitHub Gists. This script does not add the “-” required to create a markdown list (which I only realised I needed later). If you intend to use the script, you might want to add a “-” in front of the existing markdown for each line in the list of feeds.