zoë's


curated blog feeds

OPML feeds of cool blogs, curated by yours truly


coding and technology blogs

A few blogs about programming & technology in general, ranging from very practical, "here's what i did to solve this problem" kinds of articles, to more philosophical or soapbox-y blogs, talking about the impact of technology on society and vice-versa.

Example: fasterthanlime

security

Security researcher blogs talking detailing vulnerabilities, or general exploit techniques. More or less serious.

Example: siguza

news

Journalism and news, mostly about tech but can range pretty widely. Pretty empty right now, shoot me an email or DM (see footer) if you have any suggestions!

Example: Citaiton Needed


What is this?

These are lists of cool blogs and podcasts I've collected and want to share with others, distributed in the popular OPML format. This allows you to read them and keep up to date on the articles published using an RSS reader.

While OPML is generally used for backing up or transferring static lists of blogs, a few readers (e.g. FreshRSS) support so-called "dynamic OPML," which is just a fancy way of saying it will fetch a list of RSS feeds from a (link to an) OPML file, and then check those feeds for new articles.

Why do this?

Over the years, I've had a relatively big bookmark folder filled with interesting blogs or articles, called "To Read". For a long time, I just periodically visited the best ones to see if they had any new articles to read, which was somewhat of a chore and made me miss out on a bunch of interesting stuff.

However, last year I finally made the jump and started collecting RSS/Atom feeds, which centralized everything in a convenient RSS reader which would notify for new articles. If you haven't tried that yet, I really recommend it, it is supremely convenient and extremely easy.

But while I often read articles on my phone, I also stumble on new blogs through SO answers and github profiles all the time... on my laptop. This meant I'd often have to get my phone and enter the feed URL by hand. When I broke my phone, I started using my laptop a lot more for entertainment, and having to keep a synced list of the different blogs I read was kind of a pain...

After much beating around the bush, I've finally resolved to just using a self-hosted RSS aggregator. However, I also want as much portability as possible, so having my list of feeds just be a text file I could edit whenever I wanted to was my dream. In addition, it means it's easier to share that list with others, and if I add a new blog I don't have to update multiple apps or places every time to keep in sync (like I have to for zsotd), since there's only one source of truth: the OPML files.

PS: When I've finally set up a static generator for this site, I'd like to have an actual list of each blog in each feed, so that they're easier to individually peruse (and it increases their PageRank! let's go 90s!).