09
Mar

RSS Feeds

So I was going to blog about a story that came through my RSS feed, I went back to it and lost inspiration.  Maybe because I’m watching TV at the same time.  Anyway, so I changed my mind and decided to write about RSS feeds.

So I’m actually a newcomer to the whole RSS thing.  I never really saw the point of it as I had my daily sites all bookmarked and just visited those.  Every time I tried to do the RSS thing, I ended up disappointed.  Live Bookmarks, Google Reader, they just never really grabbed me.  I think the turning point was when I was reading an article that had a whole heap of pages that interested me, so I started looking around a bit more at readers.  I found NetNewsWire for the iPhone which looked pretty nicely laid out, but it required me to set up a News Gator account (I’ve actually known about News Gator for a while from looking at my website logs, one of my most active IP addresses).

So I signed up, and set it all up on the phone, which is a really nice way to pass the time on the train.  I checked out the website reader, and the funny thing is I hardly use the phone reader anymore.

Anyway, I’ve got a bit off track here, I mainly want to just list my favourite RSS feeds.  Funny thing is, I’ve got some Freelancing websites on there, and I’m not actually a Freelancer (or even really want to be).  I think the main reason why I have them there is for the web site design side.

Programming

• http://www.jasperpotts.com/blog/feed – Jasper Pott’s blog – One of the main guys that wrote Nimbus for Swing (in Java 1.6 update 10), lots of great info here.  This is mainly for work stuff, but quite interesting reading.  A lot of JavaFX stuff here now
• http://www.joelonsoftware.com/rss.xml – Joel On Software – one guy’s view on the software world. Quite accurate in a scary sort of way.
• http://www.javaspecialists.eu/archive/tjsn.rss – Java Specialists – Some pretty heavy Java reading here, but gets right into the internals with some nice tips for performance.

Freelance/Web Design

• http://feeds2.feedburner.com/fromthecouch – From the couch – a Video blog on Freelancing/Web Design.  These guys are actually pretty good in front of the camera and are very informative.
• http://rss1.smashingmagazine.com/feed/ -  Smashing Magazine – Another Freelance/Web Design blog with heaps of great info/tutorials

Others

• http://pennyarcadeart.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default – Gabe’s (from Penny Arcade) artwork. Fantastic artist
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/DilbertDailyStrip – Dilbert – Need I say more

You may notice that Penny Arcade itself isn’t up there, but that’s mainly because they are one of the websites I strongly support. I even have AdBlock turned off here (and sometimes click the ads) so they get some revenue.

I have a whole heap more on my feed, but these are the best of them. The best thing I find about feeds is that they’re fantastic for sites that aren’t updated daily. That way you don’t need to visit them all the time to see if they’re updated.