I Have a Blogroll Now!

A bit ago I collected a list of links to blogs that I enjoy tuning into. I think this is a good list of blogs; these are the ones I enjoy coming back to with some regularity - even the ones which haven't posted in a while have great articles that are worth revisiting.

There's a couple problems here though. First, I'm generally averse to blog posts with lots of updates; I think a post is a relatively static thing, so updates should be limited to correcting spelling/grammar errors and the occasional clarification. Thus, as I collect more blogs I'm disinclined to keep that page updated. The second problem is reading them: they're links in my browser and it's quite sporadic how I go about reading them. I've got most of them saved in an RSS reader on my phone but I tend to go months without remembering that that exists.

So I want a couple things: I want a dynamic page that I can update with new RSS feeds I want to tune into, and I want an easy way to be able to catch updates from these blogs. The obvious step is to add a page at the top of this site that contains the list; this isn't a post so I can update it as frequently as I want (like my now page), but then this still requires that I go onto this page and click through to read the blogs. That's not much better than having a favorites bar, though it does make the blogroll public.

It's obviously advantageous that these are RSS feeds; I should be able to set up some sort of scheme to get the latest posts from them. To me, the best place for this would be my browser homepage; I like to start my day a bit lighter before an onslaught of morning meetings, so if I could have a reading list right when I get started I'll be more inclined to tune in more frequently.

As it happens, I do have a project that I haven't finished - a static site generator which I use to generate this blog. I already know how to hook that up with GitHub Actions and Pages to get a static site really easy, so it really shouldn't be any work to set up a site that can host my bogroll and pull the latest posts from their feeds!

Indeed, it wasn't difficult to set up a first pass. I just have a JSON with a list of RSS links, and a C# script to download these RSSes, parse them, and build the site. It's just two pages: a list of blogs and a list of their latest articles (the latter page now being my browser homepage). What a deal! I didn't want to get bogged down in UI design or any super-fancy coding, so I stuck to the C# script setup that I know works, and I used MVP.css to give an attractive style to plain, old HTML. Super simple and out the door in no time!

This did replace Daily Grug as my homepage, so I'm going to need to get the daily grug quote inserted into the page.

I'll encourage you all to check out my blogroll! If you've got suggestions for blogs I should follow (or your own blog), comment below or reach out to me on any of my other channels, I'd love to find more.

In future I'll be putting in a bit of work to set up a template repo in GitHub to make it easy for anyone to use this scheme to publish a blogroll - stay tuned!