I thought it would be a good use of my time to go through my RSS feeds and come up with a list of the ones I found the most useful to me. This was probably a worthwhile activity because out of the 55 feeds that I track, I found I had a hard time narrowing down fourteen that I was really getting good value for investing my time in. I’m a strong proponent of trying to be effective in absorbing all the useful information there is on the web. With my move this summer, timed nicely with my first full time job, of moving all my tracked sites to RSS feeds, I’ve since been able to get through all the articles worth reading quicker than finishing a coffee. It might not seem like much but when you take into account that this is something you might do as part of your routine everyday, the time saved over week to week really adds up.
Going through the list also made it clear where I was spending a lot of my time, and showed me what I needed to change. After putting some thought into into it, it turns out that I was spending a lot of my time following some blogs that I never read any posts for. Refreshing the blogs you follow is something that can definitely afford to be done once every few months. Switching to a good RSS reader that saves you time is also a big part making that an effective refresh. Without further ado, these are my 14 most valuable RSS feeds, given in no particular order, that I recommend people go and check out. Feeds covering topics like Freelancing, Blogging, and Habits & Productivity have really become more pronounced in my readings in the past 2 months. These topics are what I’m really into these days and that trend is apparent in this list of top 14 feeds.
- Freelance Switch(opens in a new tab) This is my most frequented website these days. This blog always has really useful and interesting articles about freelancing.
- ProBlogger Blogging Tips(opens in a new tab) This blog has nothing but expert advice on the whole practice of blogging. I always get great tips and useful insights from this blog.
- Read/WriteWeb(opens in a new tab) On anything having to do with the web and about new web developments, ReadWriteWeb has the best articles about interesting topics.
- Life Hacker(opens in a new tab) This blog posts tons of interesting tips everyday. Not all will apply to you, but they still interesting to know about.
- Zen Habits(opens in a new tab) I’m a sucker for anything “Zen”, but this blog has good posts on self development and productivity habits.
- Ars Technica(opens in a new tab) Though I prefer ReadWriteWeb for web discussion, Ars covers a much broader range of topics. I find their articles related to Open Source and Law to be some of the best.
- Wake Up Later(opens in a new tab) My second favorite blog for freelancers, they also come up with many useful posts.
- Free Software Daily(opens in a new tab) A digg-style website for free software, all the web’s FOSS news comes through here.
- PingMag(opens in a new tab) My favorite design website. Located in Japan, it covers a ton of creative topics on design, art, and architecture, that I would never be exposed to otherwise.
- North x East(opens in a new tab) A blog with in depth posts on how to have a better blog, this site doesn’t update very frequently, but does have some insightful and indepth posts.
- BNet(opens in a new tab) The website on business topics I liked so much that I dedicated a full blog post to all the different things I like so much about it.
- Copy Blogger(opens in a new tab) This is my one resource online for learning how to write better.
- Wired(opens in a new tab) Wired news is one of the magazines for geeks to read, this is another feed that gets updated very frequently.
- Freelance Folder(opens in a new tab) The third freelancing blog I track. This blog seems to focus more on the work involved with freelancing than the other two sites. Still great stuff.
Conclusion
If anyone has gone through an RSS refresh in the past while, I’d like to hear what different sites you’ve added and removed, and why you’re keeping track of the RSS feeds that you do. Quite the coincidence it is, but one of these featured sites, Wake Up Later, just published a post on the same bearings as this one.
Everyone should check out the post called Start Reading Blogs: 40 Feeds to Read(opens in a new tab). It looks like there’s a bunch of new stuff included in that post that I’ll have to check out!
