Thinking outside the box
For the last several years I have only really followed a handful of blogs – most of them discovered during the inaugural running of “NaBloPoMo” (National Blog Posting Month), back when it was fun, and relevant, and kind of original. The fact that it was quickly exploited, argued over, and destroyed by everybody involved is neither here nor there – I discovered some amazing people who later became unlikely friends during that month of non-stop writing.
It's funny really – eight years ago it was considered a little bit crazy to try and post something to the internet every day for a month – and yet now we all think nothing of posting and commenting every day at the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Blogger, Wordpress, Reddit, Pinterest, and so on.
This lunchtime I decided to step from my front door – Bilbo Baggins style – and set about some dangerous business in search of new and interesting people to read. But where to start?
An altogether too clever idea occurred to me. Why not head to the “A-List” bloggers, and look through the people who had commented on their posts? It stands to reason that a fair proportion of those who read blogs also write. Only I'm lazy. After a minute or two scanning the comments, I got really fed up with it, and started wondering if there might be a better way.
Ten minutes later, after cracking out a text editor, and doing a few Google searches, I had a Python script to essentially grab any URL, and pull out the URLs of all the blogs mentioned (i.e. all the commenters with blogs!). After a bit of tinkering I also had it de-duplicating the list, and saving it to a text file for me.
So now I have no excuses... I have a link farming machine that gives me endless lists of (hopefully) entertaining and interesting blogs to go and visit. I just need to go visiting now, in my virtual sharabang.
Postscript – I improved it to trawl all recent posts of a blog, and grab the URL of all commenters of each post. This is going to be fun...