How I curate links for my blog
On my blog there is a section called “Links” (recently not only in English but also in German). But how do I find links that I find interesting and worth sharing? In this post I will describe my process.
What I like to read most are blogs of other people. I don’t know many of them at all, at least not personally, but met them by chance sometime in the internet. In the past on Twitter or in the Fediverse, or I found a link through other blog people’s links and thought it was so exciting that I subscribed to it.
I have often mentioned it on my blog, but most of the content I consume on the Internet I consume through an RSS reader, namely Miniflux. Many sites offer (sometimes unnoticed) a machine-readable feed with all published content. Miniflux retrieves this feed at regular intervals and shows me new content.
The blogs I am currently following can be found in my blogroll. Blogrolls are also another way for me to find new, interesting blogs that might end up in my feed reader.
But not only do I follow blogs, I also follow news aggregators. Mainly for me these are Hacker News and Lobsters. While the Hacker News community is quite “commercial” (many posts are about tech company news), Lobsters also has many entries on Linux, Open Source and similar topics. But partly they are overlapping as well. Sometimes it is especially exciting to compare the comments on both sides.
Besides blogs and aggregator pages I also follow directly some (tech) news pages. These are the German pages Heise Online, Die Zeit, Caschys Blog or Golem as well as English sites like The Verge. Often these sites also contain links to the sources, which are sometimes worth sharing.
But often I also find links when I am looking for something specific, because a topic interests me or I have a problem. Sharing the link then is one (of several) ways I bookmark.
I’m a very interested guy by nature, I can sit in front of the computer for hours, surfing and always discovering new things and I don’t get bored (ok, sometimes I do though), my curiosity even gets stronger. Sometimes I have to be careful not to become too unproductive and instead of doing work I just surf the internet looking for something interesting.
There are people who have no opinions on many things (which is fine), but I often have an opinion, sometimes a rather unpopular one, which I would like to share in order to possibly convince others of my point of view.
With my blog I want to keep a kind of journal, I want to keep track of what moves and interests me (mainly technical stuff), but I also want to give others, who don’t like to surf the web for hours, a chance to see interesting things I have picked for them. In my work and study environment I am known to be always up-to-date.