Recently, a former student asked me,
I was in a .NET web services training class that you gave probably 4 or so years ago on-site at a [company name] office in [city], north of Atlanta. At that time I asked you for a list of the technical blogs that you read, and I am curious which blogs you are reading now. I am now with a small company where I have to be a jack of all trades, in the last year I have worked in C++ and Perl backend type projects and web frontend projects with Java, C#, and RoR, so I find your perspective interesting since you also work with various technologies and aren't a zealot for a specific one.
Any way, please either respond by email or in your blog, because I think that others may be interested in the list also.
As one might expect, my blog list is a bit eclectic, but I suppose that's part of the charm of somebody looking to study Java, .NET, C++, Smalltalk, Ruby, Parrot, LLVM, and other languages and environments. So, without further ado, I've pasted in the contents of my OPML file for cut&paste and easy import.
Having said that, though, I would strongly suggest not just blindly importing the whole set of feeds into your nearest RSS reader, but take a moment and go visit each one before you add it. It takes longer, granted, but the time spent is a worthy investment--you don't want to have to declare "blog bankruptcy".
Editor's note: We pause here as readers look at each other and go... "WTF?!?"
"Blog bankruptcy" is a condition similar to "email bankruptcy", when otherwise perfectly high-functioning people give up on trying to catch up to the flood of messages in their email client's Inbox and delete the whole mess (usually with some kind of public apology explaining why and asking those who've emailed them in the past to resend something if it was really important), effectively trying to "start over" with their email in much the same way that Chapter Seven or Chapter Eleven allows companies to "start over" with their creditors, or declaring bankruptcy allows private citizens to do the same with theirs. "Blog bankruptcy" is a similar kind of condition: your RSS reader becomes so full of stuff that you can't keep up, and you can't even remember which blogs were the interesting ones, so you nuke the whole thing and get away from the blog-reading thing for a while.
This happened to me, in fact: a few years ago, when I became the editor-in-chief of TheServerSide.NET, I asked a few folks for their OPML lists, so that I could quickly and easily build a list of blogs that would "tune me in" to the software industry around me, and many of them quite agreeably complied. I took my RSS reader (Newsgator, at the time) and dutifully imported all of them, and ended up with a collection of blogs that was easily into the hundreds of feeds long. And, over time, I found myself reading fewer and fewer blogs, mostly because the whole set was so... intimidating. I mean, I would pick at the list of blogs and their entries in the same way that I picked at vegetables on my plate as a child--half-heartedly, with no real enthusiasm, as if this was something my parents were forcing me to do. That just ruined the experience of blog-reading for me, and eventually (after I left TSS.NET for other pastures), I nuked the whole thing--even going so far as to uninstall my copy of Newsgator--and gave up.
Naturally, I missed it, and slowly over time began to rebuild the list, this time, taking each feed one at a time, carefully weighing what value the feed was to me and selecting only those that I thought had a high signal-to-noise ratio. (This is partly why I don't include much "personal" info in this blog--I found myself routinely stripping away those blogs that had more personal content and less technical content, and I figured if I didn't want to read it, others probably felt the same way.) Over the last year or two, I've rebuilt the list to the point where I probably need to prune a bit and close a few of them back down, but for now, I'm happy with the list I've got.
And speaking of which....
1: <?xml version="1.0"?>
2: <opml version="1.0">
3: <head>
4: <title>OPML exported from Outlook</title>
5: <dateCreated>Thu, 15 May 2008 20:55:19 -0700</dateCreated>
6: <dateModified>Thu, 15 May 2008 20:55:19 -0700</dateModified>
7: </head>
8: <body>
9: <outline text="If broken it is, fix it you should" type="rss"
10: xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/tess/rss.xml"/>
11: <outline text="Artima Developer Buzz" type="rss"
12: xmlUrl="http://www.artima.com/news/feeds/news.rss"/>
13: <outline text="Artima Weblogs" type="rss"
14: xmlUrl="http://www.artima.com/weblogs/feeds/weblogs.rss"/>
15: <outline text="Artima Chapters Library" type="rss"
16: xmlUrl="http://www.artima.com/chapters/feeds/chapters.rss"/>
17: <outline text="Neal Gafter's blog" type="rss"
18: xmlUrl="http://gafter.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>
19: <outline text="Room 101" type="rss"
20: xmlUrl="http://gbracha.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>
21: <outline text="Kelly O'Hair's Blog" type="rss"
22: xmlUrl="http://weblogs.java.net/blog/kellyohair/index.rdf"/>
23: <outline text="John Rose @ Sun" type="rss"
24: xmlUrl="http://blogs.sun.com/jrose/feed/entries/atom"/>
25: <outline text="The Daily WTF" type="rss"
26: xmlUrl="http://syndication.thedailywtf.com/TheDailyWtf"/>
27: <outline text="Brad Wilson" type="rss"
28: xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/BradWilson"/>
29: <outline text="Mike Stall's .NET Debugging Blog" type="rss"
30: xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/jmstall/rss.xml"/>
31: <outline text="Stevey's Blog Rants" type="rss"
32: xmlUrl="http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml"/>
33: <outline text="Brendan's Roadmap Updates" type="rss"
34: xmlUrl="http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/index.rdf"/>
35: <outline text="pl patterns" type="rss"
36: xmlUrl="http://plpatterns.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>
37: <outline text="Joel Pobar's weblog" type="rss"
38: xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/callvirt"/>
39: <outline text="Let&#39;s Kill Dave!" type="rss"
40: xmlUrl="http://letskilldave.com/rss.aspx"/>
41: <outline text="Why does everything suck?" type="rss"
42: xmlUrl="http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/feeds/posts/default"/>
43: <outline text="cdiggins.com" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://cdiggins.com/feed"/>
44: <outline text="LukeH's WebLog" type="rss"
45: xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/lukeh/rss.xml"/>
46: <outline text="Jomo Fisher -- Sharp Things" type="rss"
47: xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/jomo_fisher/rss.xml"/>
48: <outline text="Chance Coble" type="rss"
49: xmlUrl="http://leibnizdream.wordpress.com/feed/"/>
50: <outline text="Don Syme's WebLog on F# and Other Research Projects" type="rss"
51: xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/dsyme/rss.xml"/>
52: <outline text="David Broman's CLR Profiling API Blog" type="rss"
53: xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/davbr/rss.xml"/>
54: <outline text="JScript Blog" type="rss"
55: xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/rss.xml"/>
56: <outline text="Yet Another Language Geek" type="rss"
57: xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/wesdyer/rss.xml"/>
58: <outline text=".NET Languages Weblog" type="rss"
59: xmlUrl="http://www.dotnetlanguages.net/DNL/Rss.aspx"/>
60: <outline text="DevHawk" type="rss"
61: xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Devhawk"/>
62: <outline text="The Cobra Programming Language" type="rss"
63: xmlUrl="http://cobralang.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>
64: <outline text="Code Miscellany" type="rss"
65: xmlUrl="http://codemiscellany.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>
66: <outline text="Fred, Let it go!" type="rss"
67: xmlUrl="http://freddy33.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>
68: <outline text="Codedependent" type="rss"
69: xmlUrl="http://graphics-geek.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>
70: <outline text="Presentation Zen" type="rss"
71: xmlUrl="http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/index.rdf"/>
72: <outline text="The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method" type="rss"
73: xmlUrl="http://extremepresentation.typepad.com/blog/index.rdf"/>
74: <outline text="ZapThink" type="rss"
75: xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/zapthink"/>
76: <outline text="Chris Smith's completely unique view" type="rss"
77: xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChrisSmithsCompletelyUniqueView"/>
78: <outline text="Code Commit" type="rss"
79: xmlUrl="http://feeds.codecommit.com/codecommit"/>
80: <outline
81: text="Comments on Ola Bini: Programming Language Synchronicity: A New Hope: Polyglotism"
82: type="rss"
83: xmlUrl="http://ola-bini.blogspot.com/feeds/5778383724683099288/comments/default"/>
84: </body>
85: </opml>
Happy reading.....
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