Wildcard Wednesday

Thought that since I'm sort of wrapping up 2008 and doing some different things with 2009, I'd take this opportunity to publicly do some spring cleaning of my RSS Reader. I use Google Reader to handle the stuff I like(d) to read regularly. I want to pare down my readings (to maybe a dozen sites) and put stuff more pertinent to what I'm doing and feeling and liking. Here's what's in there now and what I'm doing with it:

101 Cookbooks - a nice vegetarian cooking site. The author has a great knack for making nice dishes out of leftovers. I made her celery soup in a previous post. This one stays (#1).

Marc Andreessen's blog - entrepreneur who founded Netscape. He stopped adding content in May of last year. This one goes.

Brew Crew Ball - You might be surprised to find that there is only one baseball site in my reader and it's one about the Milwaukee Brewers, a team of which I'm not particularly a fan. I started reading this site because Jeff Sackmann wrote it (a very smart and interesting fellow) but he has left and some other guys maintain it now and do a fantastic job. Good news, good reporting, good analysis, minors and majors. This is how a team site should be done. It stays (#2).

Defective Yeti - Used to love reading Matt Baldwin. He's about my age and I think if we grew up together we would have hung out. Sadly, though, he's moved away from his blog and spends more time on Twitter. So fare thee well. I'll probably check the site from time to time but no need to keep it in the reader.

Marmaduke Explained - I loved, loved, loved this site. Joe Mathlete (what a cool last name) would take Marmaduke cartoons and write new captions for them. He sort of lost his zest for it and has only done two cartoons in the last six months of the year. I'll check back in the future but for now, it's leaving the reader (but if you haven't read it, go check it out).

Joe Posnanski - sportswriter for the Kansas City Star. Insightful, entertaining and someone who can and will write about anything for any length of time. Seriously, I would be shocked if he ever has had writer's block. Definitely stays (#3).

Jason Kottke - hard to say goodbye to someone with whom you've been connected to for a long time and someone who is a bit of an internet legend. Our tastes have been diverging and I had been thinking of dumping him. When I saw his list of favorite links from his site from 2008 and saw how few of them I had clicked through, I knew it was time.

Leighton Davis - this is a tough one. I have an internet crush on Leighton. Discovered her when she wrote a humor piece that McSweeney's used. Started reading her blog. Loved it. It may be the only personal blog I've been able to stay attached to reading. Leighton doesn't post all that often and I got tired of checking her site far more frequently than she posted which is why I put her in my reader. She's in law school now and posts even less than she did before. She writes so well and I like her so I'm keeping her (#4).

Positivity Blog - from time to time there's good stuff on here but every post is like a magazine article - Seven ways to do this. Nine things you need to know about that. The five best ways to do some other thing. That drives me nuts. Gone.

Questionable Content - From reading this and now abandoning it and having done so with Goats, I have decided that it is a very difficult thing to write comics. Both QC and Goats entertained me for a long time and then just went out there with the story lines. I'm just not interested anymore. So now I have no webcomics.

Seth Godin - another business blog I read. Godin manages to write something every day. It's light, it's snappy, it's usually not anything too profound. He knows how to market. He knows how to sell. He knows about business. He stays (#5).

Signal vs. Noise - the blog of the company 37Signals. I think they're great guys who have great products but their blog seems to have gone too much towards their product and customers. I use a free version of one of their products and so don't care too much about new features and stuff. I'm also not a programmer and don't care about that stuff. They used to do a lot more about business and design and I miss that. This is a tough call. It's also frustrating the way they have their RSS feed set up. You have to click through on a lot of them which defeats the purpose of the feed. I don't know. Tentatively keeping (#6).

Teamwork Online - professional sports job board. Great if you're looking for an internship or want to live in a major metropolitan area. I'm neither. Removed.

Keith Law - If Leighton Davis is my internet crush, Keith Law is my internet man-crush. Law is a writer for ESPN.com and a former member of the Toronto Blue Jays front office. His personal blog is devoted to cooking and reading, two things I enjoy doing immensely, and our tastes are often concurrent. He also has a facility for learning foreign languages and shares tips about that. Sometimes even writes about baseball. Definitely stays (#7).

The Happiness Project - If I had a propensity for drinking, I'd chalk up the inclusion of this one to my having overindulged. Since I don't drink, I'll just say I made a mistake which I am now correcting.

Well Fed - The internet sometimes makes you forget that there are people behind each and everyone of these sites. Grant (I forget his last name) doesn't let that happen. He writes about what he cooks (and is the inspiration behind my cooking posts). When he's busy with work or buying a house or remodeling it, his posts lag but he writes about it. He doesn't vanish from the scene. I like that. He stays (#8).

That's it. I'm left with eight. I'm adding two right now, though.

Cardboard Junkie - best baseball card site on the net and I read it everyday anyway. Needs to be added.

Between Love and Like - Going to give this one a shot. She did some awesome interviews with The Airborne Toxic Event and I need some music reading.

That gives me ten. I may also add Keith Law and Rob Neyer's ESPN.com blogs since they became free from The Insider hold late in 2008. We'll see.