Kent Newsome feeds my ego by calling me the Tom Clancy of the blogosphere:
He’s one of my favorite software reads, and the Tom Clancy of the blogosphere. Lots of hard, but understandable, tech. Very little “me too” posts about the latest bookmarking application, etc.
Blush.
Last I checked, I’m a few million readers short of being Tom Clancy, but I do have a passion for software that’s usable and worth your time. And I happen to think writing about software is as important as writing software, if not more so. So yes, that’s a left-speechless compliment. Oh, and thanks!
Now let’s do my part and add five recommended blogs to read. I didn’t think it would be this hard, I’ll just go through my feed reader, find five blogs to recommend and list them. Well, narrowing it down to just five turned out to be half the battle. Then I learned what it’s like being a cat and guarding the milk. Every time I looked into the feed reader to scan for the next possible recommendation, new posts would show up and I end up reading instead of editing.
So a few gallons of milk later, and I finally have a list. I picked one blogger from each of five categories, that pretty much reflect the mixture of blogs I subscribe to.
Dev. One of my favorite dev bloggers, Reg knows how to tell a good story, get the point across, and be opinionated but not stuck in a mantra. Case in point, Reg tell us what we can all learn from Haskell (and there’s a lot to it), without being a member of the Haskell Is Godly cult.
Web. Ismael’s geek diet consists of a zero-fat Mac and all the Web services you can eat. If you work for Microsoft, this is the best accident-waiting-to-happen blog to read. But if like me, you don’t want to spend the rest of your life being a sysadmin, or pay the software license mortgage, IT|Redux has the best Web Office picks out of all the Web 2.0 PR repeater blogs.
Life. Did you know it’s easier to swallow pills if you tilt your head forward? Matthew Baldwin’s trade tricks is common day practical advise, trickling through your feed reader, so you can pick up one new trick every day. That’s about as much learning capacity left after going through all the other Ruby this, iPhone that blogs.
Pointers. There will come a day when I had enough of “Ron Paul for president” (aka Reddit), and just switch to reading a select few tumblelogs. My favorite nourishment these days is Engtech Lite. If you like Labnotes, you’d love this tumbelog and its daily pick of pointers from all around the Web. By Engtech.
Humor. Yes, there could be too many posts about Ruby. And 20 back-to-back “news” posts about Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner makes for a very dull feed reading. So lately, I started mixing some geek humor into my feeds. Check out f8d. It’s Seinfeld meets Perl, and they both get caught up in a 2×2 comic strip.
Lyle Johnson
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