RSS Feeds

I don't know why it's taken a Web 2.0 training class for me to start using RSS feeds - I already have access to Google Reader through my gmail, and it saves so much time! Here's a few of the sites I've subscribed to:

News and Current Affairs
ABC News. To be honest, I don't check online news that often (for natural disasters and pop culture news, I tend to find out first from the ripples of my flist on livejournal), but when I do it's always ABC's.


Recipes
There are many, many excellent food blogs out there; these three are a few that have stood me in good stead:

• David Lebovitz, who I looked up after reading his book of icecream recipes ('The Perfect Scoop').


• Rose Levy Berenbaum, the resource for baking - breads, cakes, buns, you name it.


• Chocolate & Zucchini, a blog kept by Parisian Clotilde Dusoulier. Her extensive archive of recipes (complete with tempting photos) is mouthwatering and easy to search or browse.

Travel
Something a little unusual, since I'm not planning any big trips: urban exploration. Urban exploration sets out to investigate little-seen areas of the urban/industrial environment, such as utility tunnels, abandoned buildings, sewers and catacombs.

• Scouting NY, a blog kept by a film location scout based in New York City. Fair warning, he takes extensive location photos and even one post can take a while to load.


• Telefunker, a blog for urban exploration in Europe.


• Long Exposure, "excursions in (mostly nocturnal) photography)". This is one of the more gorgeous and deliberately artsy of the urban exploration blogs I've found, since his focus is on the photography aspect rather than on documenting an adventure (although if there's one thing I've found in browsing urban exploration blogs, it's that it inspires a lot of amazing and unusual photographs).


• Undercity, "guerilla history and urban exploration". More gorgeous photography from an urban historian.


• No Promise of Safety, a blog by a small group of urban explorers documenting their adventures.

Other Stuff

• Daily Coyote, a daily photoblog of Charlie, a tame-ish coyote living in Wyoming.


• The blog of John Rogers, showrunner of Leverage (a con/heist show in the vein of Hustle, The A-Team and Mission: Impossible). Rogers' posts are irregular, due to his writing and show-running schedule, but he answers questions about each episode and interacts with his audience in a very proactive way.


• The blog of Mike Atherton (aka sizemore). Atherton wrote the sizzle reel for British science fiction show Slingers which went viral about 7 months ago ("the best scifi show that doesn't exist yet"); his blog is the best place to watch for updates as it goes through the long, slow road to creation.

The subscription folders in Google Reader are also useful for managing feeds - particularly when I started subscribing to some prolific Twitter users like Stephen Fry and Warren Ellis and wanted to detangle their tweets from everything else!

All in all, RSS feeds are so much nicer and quicker than the neurotic tour of blogs and other sites via bookmarks to see if anyone's updated :).