As a long-overdue update to this site, I’ve added a blogroll with all the best feeds I follow!
selection criteria
This blogroll by no means contains everything that I follow—I have over a hundred feeds in my aggregator—but instead I picked a select few.
The selection criteria I went through for most of the feeds:
- The writing needs a level of quality control. For the most part, I haven’t included feeds that are full of random thoughts without much explanation or elaboration of them. Similarly, while this isn’t a hard rule, I’ve favored blogs that have a great and unique writing style.
- I need to have been following the feed for a long time. There are some blogs I follow that I might add eventually, but I want to take a good bit of time and review them over a longer period to ensure that they’re up to my standards.
- I prioritize new thoughts and ideas, not book or movie reviews or people jumping on the bandwagon of article topic and format trends. That doesn’t mean the blogs I link don’t have the occasional book or movie review, but if that’s most of what a blog posts, I probably won’t link to it.
- Something I haven’t actually checked for all of them, but should go through to be sure, I don’t want to link to sites with ads or invasive tracking. I don’t think any of these sites have that, but I haven’t checked to be sure (using an adblocker means I often don’t see it when it’s there).
- While there are some good blogs that haven’t been active in a while, I tried to link only to sites that still receive updates.
Now, to be clear—it’s possible to break these criteria and still have a great blog. I follow plenty of blogs that don’t quite meet these standards. But these are the standards I’m willing to endorse sites with.
why start a blogroll?
Me adding a blogroll to my site has been a long time coming; I knew about them, but didn’t have any desire to add one. To summarize my reasons against:
- What I follow feels private, I didn’t really want to share it
- I didn’t want to make anyone I interact with frequently sad that they didn’t make the list
- I didn’t want to have to handle the upkeep of the list as yet another thing to be sure is up to date
My change of mind really came when building my web crawler, a few days go. That started me thinking about how discovering sites works on the web; generally, you’re gonna discover a website through one of these ways:
- It comes up in a search result
- Someone sends you a link to it or to an article on it
- Someone you follow links to it
I don’t want people to have to rely on the first method—search engines should not be the primary discovery method for websites, historically they haven’t done a great job at steering you to websites that respect you and have great quality-control. Instead, they steer you to sites that make them the most money—which, in essence, comes down to ad-ridden or LLM-generated pages that game the ranking algorithms. (I know, I know, this is a slightly odd statement from someone coding a search engine, but I’m trying to do a better job on these counts.)
Getting sent a link is great, but not really under your control. When you’re wanting more sites to follow, the best you can do in that regard is ask your friends to send you cool sites and articles.
Which leaves people linking to each other from their personal sites. As I coded a crawler, I loved whenever it ran across one of these pages, since it would instantly learn about a couple dozen high-quality new sites to peruse.
Anyway, perhaps this was long-winded, but my reasoning for adding a blogroll ends up coming down to this: “I love these sites, I want other people to find them too. And the best way to do that is to put together a list of sites people will love.”
If you follow sites you love, please consider doing the same. And feel free to send me the link, I’m always looking for more great feeds to peruse!
And now, without further ado, go read my blogroll.
