The ones I read first in my long blogroll

13 Jan 2005

I have a long list of blogs/websites (233 feeds at this moment) to read in my Bloglines account. I don’t have the time to read all of them nowadays (I used to), so I’m finding myself skimming through a select few blogs. Weirdly, even though bloggers like Scoble make very interesting posts, I tend to not read them because he’s just too damn prolific and I don’t have the time to read all the posts. Hmm… Interesting… I was just about to check whether there was a way to keep a post unread in Bloglines and there is (there’s a “Keep New” checkbox at the bottom of every feed item). Well, maybe this will get me reading Scoble again.

As I was saying, I don’t read every feed I subscribe to nowadays. (By the way, Bloglines only keeps 200 entries per feed before it stops keeping track of new ones.) What I do now is go through the list from top to bottom and check out the ones that I seem to be more interested in. It’s interesting to see a pattern. I tend to give feeds with too many unread items a miss, resulting in a vicious cycle of them never getting read. Feeds with 30 new items a day, these I also tend to not read. I also read too many Mozilla-related blogs. Here’s my list of “To Read” blogs (arranged in no particular order) whenever I’m short on time or just too plain lazy to read everything:

Jon Hicks’ hicksdesign
One of my favorite designers who also happens to be a mean programmer (at least from what I can tell from Jon’s hacking of Textpattern, which powers his blog and portfolio).
Bernie Zimmermann
Mozilla blogger and Firefox GrayModern Theme author
Chris Pederick
Chris Pederick is the author of the Web Developer Tools Firefox extension, among other cool projects.
Forever Geek
Which I contribute to, but I’m on hiatus now.
Gadgetopia
Lots of neat posts and links on technology
Gentoo Linux News
Not a blog, but I love Gentoo!
Gravatar blog
I think Gravatars are pretty sweet, this keeps me in the loop of what Tom Werner’s up to.
Life At Ngee Ann
This is a fellow Singaporean’s blog, quite humorous. “Ngee Ann” refers to Ngee Ann polytechnic, a local academic institution.
life in mono
Fellow Singaporean Adrianna’s a cool techie Mac evangelist.
adot’s notblog*
Asa Dotzler’s blog. Mozilla stuff is always interesting.
cheeaunblog
Author of the famous Phoenity theme, who happens to live in Penang where I some relatives stay. Maybe we can meet up when I go there, huh, Chee Aun?
Neil’s World
Neil Turner blogs stuff that I would blog myself if I could. Well, mostly. Mozilla and tech blog.
Photo Matt
Matthew Mullenweg’s the lead developer of WordPress, and turned 21 not long ago.
philwilson.org
Phil Wilson blogs mostly on Firefox and the Semantic Web.
vantan.org: The Daily Weblog
Fellow Singaporean Vanessa Tan is a “devoted Netizen” who works in an environment unfriendly to Firefox.
The Burning Edge
Used to follow this religiously, but a little less now because of more infrequent posts and also because much of the work now is bug fixing since the Aviary branch landing.

Not too many A-list bloggers in that list, but that’s probably because people like Simon Willison and Doug Bowman have been posting less of late. Give these blogs/sites a visit or two and let me know if you know of any related blog that I can add to my feed aggregator (yes, I’m still interested in more despite an unread list of hundreds).

11 Responses to The ones I read first in my long blogroll

Rory Parle

January 13th, 2005 at 10pm

My solution was to put the blogs I’ll always read in a group called, imaginatively enough, “must read”. You’re in it, along with anyone else whose posts are just the right frequency, length, and interest to keep me paying attention. I only have 72 feeds though, so I can usually keep up with all of them.

Dave M.

January 14th, 2005 at 1am

Bloglines has a problem with that checkbox these days. If you check the Keep New checkbox, the item you checked will still go away from view. The sidebar will say that you have unread items, but you can’t get to it. Once this happens, the only way to restore the sidebar is to unsubscribe to the feed and then re-subscribe to it.

I have sent a report to them, and they said they would look into it, but last I checked, it still wasn’t fixed.

You might want to check to make sure it works first, then if it doesn’t, maybe your voice reporting the bug will help it get fixed…

Mike Christianson

January 14th, 2005 at 4am

I, too, have noticed the same bug as Dave M. When I wrote in, their response was essentially “We’re aware of it, thanks.” And, that was about… two months ago.

Sometimes, if you use the option at the bottom of the feed view to Display All Items, you can find the one(s) you’re missing. But, unfortunately, this doesn’t always work… very frustrating.

antrix

January 14th, 2005 at 10am

Since you are into Linux, I’ll plug Eudyptula minor here. It’s a blog tracking the Linux desktop space; a friend and I started it a couple of weeks ago.

Drop by and leave a comment!

Anne

January 24th, 2005 at 2pm

Chu Yeow, I just popped in to see how you were doing. Haven’t seen you around lately on MSN so I was a bit worried. Glad to see you’re just busy ;)

Velvet

January 25th, 2005 at 11pm

Where was bugly in your list of favorite bloggers? I mean come on, bugly’s velvet has its finger on the pulse of whats important and why its important. Nice blog by the way.

Mark

February 6th, 2005 at 4am

I have the same problem – too many subscriptions – 211 at last count. I’ve started using the “clip/blog this” and putting them into clippings for the ones I save. That doesn’t help with the ones that I lose because of the 200 limit, but I can’t keep everything.
Also every once in a while I clean everything out by clicking the “211 feeds” link, almost always accidentally.