Marx famously wrote on RSS and syndication: it is “… the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the OPML of the people.”
OK, he didn’t quite say that. Let me tell you a more human story. When I started at Thoughtworks in 2004, the first thing my mentor gave me was an OPML of feeds I should be reading. I’d forgotten all about RSS, falling into the algorithmic trap of letting corporations decide what I see, read and notice. And replacing the real opportunity to share something with like buttons and boosts.
So, for the last few weeks, I’ve been using the RSS aggregator InoReader (and paying for it) while collating my list of blogs.
I had a 400 word rant here about the way InoReader gets in my way, including enumerating the 100 or so buttons its designers seem to think I might need to see at all times. Urgh, it’s horrible and ‘full-featured’. I can’t wait to leave it and will do so as soon as I have found or built an alternative.
However, I have collected a large number of feeds and I’m going to share them here. It’s a work in progress, but share early and share often is the rule around here.
There’s a new blogroll section on this site! One OPML per category, or you can hoover up the whole lot in one go.
A few rules I set myself. Individuals over organisations, and everything had to have posted in the last eighteen months. And Ruby and Rails are separate lists, for reasons regular readers can probably guess. Rails, I thought, needed some more living space.
I tended to add in bulk from lists I found elsewhere and then prune. You might find it useful, or you might even want to make your own. If you think it’s missing something important, let me know!
Some of the categories were easier to curate than others: the Ruby one is largely the people who make the language, and most of it came from the feed list at Ruby Land. The economics one started from the blogroll of Chris Dillow, which I rescued from the Wayback Machine - Chris is on Substack now. The roleplaying list leans on the Bloggies, which is the OSR community doing this job for itself every year. Others were harder. There are almost no people blogging about Cambridge any more, and the electronics crowd have mostly moved to YouTube, so a few entries there are channel feeds.
I’m pretty sure Marx also said: “I refuse to subscribe to any RSS feed that would have me as a reader.” But what did he know? Go find someone who still reads blogs and steal their OPML.