Problogger – this is a great site for anyone interested in monetizing their blog or at least taking it more seriously. I’m interested in monetizing like I am in getting thin. It would be great some day, but in the meantime, I’m reading everything I can about it.
Get Rich Slowly – A common sense approach to personal finance. The basic premise is freeing up funds for the things that are important to you by cutting back or eliminating the things that are not.
Busted Halo – I have talked about this site before. It’s a lighthearted approach to all things Catholic. Keep in mind that it is only the delivery which is nontraditional, not the theology.
Zen Habits – This is a great site for anyone interested in simplifying her life. A minimalist view of just about anything.
Texts From Last Night – This is a very funny site. People send in what are normally drunken texts. You may not want to read if you have college aged children. Example:
(267): WHY. COME BACK. TRAPPED WITH ROOMMATE AND FALCON. SAVE ME. I HAVE HUMMUS.
Not Always Right – This site consists of crazy customer service issues from the viewpoint of the employee. Example:
(Mall | Portland, OR, USA)
(A customer approaches one of the security guards.)
Customer: “Your escalators are broken.”
Security: “What do you mean by broken?”
Customer: “They aren’t moving.”
Security: “Okay. Which one is it?”
(The customer leads the security guard to the “escalator” and stands on the top step.)
Customer: “See, broken.”
Security: “Sir, those are stairs.”
Lifehacker – This is a super high volume site. I think I probably get 30 -50 posts a day into my feed from them. Just today, they posted items from etiquette to car maintenance to text editing for developers.
A couple of reasons that sites did not make it into my top google feeds:
Video: I usually have neither the time nor the inclination to watch video when I am powering through my feed.
Partial feeds: some RSS feeds only provide a teaser paragraph, requiring you to go to the blog itself to get the full post. This is not to say that I don’t read full blogs, I just don’t put them into my google reader.
There is one other site I have to mention. I read it faithfully, but I don’t put it into my reader. I just can’t. That site is damnyouautocorrect.com.
For me to read this site, I need to go into complete isolation. A cave, some sort of bunker, a panic room. Anyplace that isolates me from the general populace while providing me with a space to dissolve into a puddle of oxygen-deprived hysterics. I may also need room to curl into a fetal position and rock.
The site is entirely made up of texts that have been autocorrected into absurdity by iPhones.
Warning: this site is definitely PG13 at best.
So, this is what I have been doing with the bulk of my free time the last few months (when I am not playing cello!). I was hit by the layoff shoulder tap twice (!) in the last two years. Each time I found a new job reasonably quickly and a big part of that was relying on both my personal network (thanks Kelly) and my social network.
Ooh Something Shiny! 