News You Can Bruise for 2008 December 30 (entry 0)

(6) Tue Dec 30 2008 09:54 Best Of Weblogs 2008: Keep looking back! This will probably be the last 2008 retrospective unless I decide to go through the books I read in 2008 or whatever. These are the syndication feeds I'm happiest I subscribed to in 2008. Caution: may contain nepotism.

• A Symbol A Day: only exists as an RSS feed. Every day there is a new symbol.
• Back of the Cereal Box: essays on obscure pop culture topics. But they're the obscure topics my age cohort cares about, so bite me.
• Also cordially invited to bite me is Twitter. If it takes longer for me to context-switch than to read something, I'm not going to read it. The only Twitter feed I read is Rachel Chalmers's, and she protects her updates, so I can't link to them.
• At the opposite end of the attention spectrum are podcasts, which I don't really listen to except while cleaning the kitchen. For such a task I prefer the harsh cleaning power of Retronauts and The Children's Hour of Knowledge.
• Friend weblogs: Kirk, because the RSS feed finally kind of works and because I met him this year. Evan finally started his own weblog and now only comments on 60% of my entries.
• Comics: chainsawsuit and Hark! A Vagrant!
• The Brothers Brick aggregates cool LEGO pictures so I only have to skim one LEGO weblog.
• Cinemassacre. James Rolfe is prolific and funny.
• Susan McCarthy tells awesome stories about animal behavior, and sometimes about Soviet show trials.
• Topic: video games. I unsubscribed from Gamasutra and subscribed to sister site GameSetWatch instead, because 1) when there's something I'd be interested in on Gamasutra, GSW usually links to it, 2) the columns are great, 3) they link to my weblog sometimes, and Gamasutra never did that.

  I also subscribed to DS Fanboy and Nintendo Wii Fanboy and Tiny Cartridge so I wouldn't be wandering around in a haze with no knowledge of the games available for the game systems we got this year. I feel like I should get rid of one of those subscriptions, but if I had to choose I'd get rid of NWF, which would leave me without total platform coverage!

  Finally, Auntie Pixelante is great all the time, like if Jake Berendes made video games about B&D.

• Topic: science fiction. On the demand side, tor.com is much better than the fluffy Gawkeriffic io9. On the supply side, the specficmarkets Livejournal community.

Comments:

Posted by kirk at Tue Dec 30 2008 15:49

"Kirk, because the RSS feed finally kind of works" -- man, now that is vindication! No, wait, that's syndication.

Got it.

I'd probably have a better feed if I ever used feeds. What reader do you use?

Posted by Leonard at Tue Dec 30 2008 20:01

I've used Akgregator and Google Reader. Your weblog shows up strangely in both. Try it in GR real quick and you'll see. Or use the Feed Validator.

Posted by Drew at Wed Dec 31 2008 00:32

Leonard, thanks so much. My blog being found by you is like the homely girl at prom being asked to dance, at long last. And I will dance Leonard. Watch me dance!

Posted by Evan at Wed Dec 31 2008 08:52

hey now, i'll strive to get my crummy.com comment ratio (cccr?) back up in the 90th percentile in 2009.

Posted by kirk at Wed Dec 31 2008 13:42

My site isn't intrinsically feed friendly, since it's atom is a day, and then there are malleable "subatomic parts".

Do other sites embed things ok, like youtube video?

It's stuff like this that make me think feeds are overrated, a n ugly subset of what weblogs can be and do

Posted by Brendan at Wed Dec 31 2008 19:46

I am gratified to find my podcast in such rare company! I will strive to make it even more scouring and poisonous in the new year.