Blogroll

January 29, 2024

I was reading Matthias Ott’s newsletter, Own Your Web this morning. He commented on the number of articles recently decrying that “blogging is dead” or “where have all the personal websites gone.” Like Matthias, I have felt like the Indie Web is having a moment and a comeback. I think these headlines are greatly exaggerated. I think a lot of people never stopped posting on their sites or many have a renewed commitment to their sites in the demise of Twitter.

One issue that Matthias mentioned is the problem of visibility and discoverability amid the social media chatter. One solution to this problem is to share our posts on our social media channels and links to posts we find interesting. He also encouraged the return to the practice of having a blogroll on our sites to help point our readers to other interesting people.

He challenged his readers to consider adding a blogroll to their site this week. Start small with eight links plus a description of each of those sites and why we picked them.

I am going to accept the challenge by starting here with this post and then adding a more extensive list in the future. So here are some of the blogs or sites that I follow and why. This was actually pretty easy to put together because I had already put together a list last week in my post, Blogging and me.

• Jeremy Keith – Jeremy has consistently put out content since before I started following him back in 2006. I enjoy his commentary on the Web industry and the practice of development. And I also enjoy his more personal stories as well.
• Dave Rupert – Dave has a lot of good insights about a lot of different things though it is mainly focused on making websites. But I also like that he shares a lot of personal stuff. He is one of the people who inspired me to start doing weeknotes and to expand it beyond just what I did in my work that week.
• Chris Coyier – I have known Chris or known about Chris for at least 15 years now. I benefitted greatly from his writing on CSS Tricks. I am glad that he is posting on his site. Or that I finally started following that site because I used to just read CSS Tricks. I enjoy his mixture of commentary on the practice of web development, sharing thoughts from other people and adding commentary about that, or just sharing about trips he has taken or other things from his personal and family life. His podcast, Shop Talk Show, has also inspired many of my writings. Chris is a great example of someone excited about what he learns and is just as excited to pass it along.
• Ahmad Shadeed – I started following Ahmad’s blog about three or four years ago. He has a lot of great content. I love that he supplies an abundant amount of examples in his articles. He says that he is “passionate about bridging design and code in an easy and understandable manner.” I strongly believe that he delivers on that promise.
• Ethan Marcotte – I always enjoy reading Ethan’s very thoughtful posts on design and development. And in recent years, I have enjoyed his thoughts about unions and worker’s rights in tech.
• Andy Bell – Andy writes in several different places. His personal site. Piccalilli, which is his front-end-focused blog. And at Set Studio, his design agency.
• Tim Challies – Tim is a Christian writer and is writing from that perspective. I like his daily A La Carte posts where he links to other Christian writers or articles of interest as well as keeping me up-to-date with Kindle deals from mostly Christian writers. I also enjoy his articles and book reviews.
• Jon Bloom – Jon is one of my favorite Christian authors. I just realized in putting this together that the RSS feed on the Desiring God site no longer works and I have not been getting his articles in my reader for a while.
• Michelle Barker – I have enjoyed Michelle’s development-focused blog. I think she does a great job of teaching and gives a lot of great examples. I was inspired to post every day in December after reading about her experiences of doing it during November. I appreciate that she has been wrestling with the purpose and the focus of her blog in the future and sharing that process in her writing.
• Jim Nielsen – I just recently started reading Jim’s writings. I enjoy his short thoughts about the practice of web development. I also like that he writes about other areas of his life as well. Several of his posts have inspired posts I have made.
• Chris Ferdinandi – Chris is a newer follow for me. I particularly like his posts on scripting and accessibility.

This is a good list to start with. Here is my OPML file. I do need to clean it up a bit as there are a lot of old feeds that have not been updated recently. I use Feedly as my RSS reader and save things to read later in Pocket.

Update: I created a blogroll page later in the day. It includes all the blogs/sites mentioned in this post along with some other ones I added.