tilman.me

Web Feed Roll

(Like a blog roll, but with working web feeds)

Web feeds are a quiet way to keep up with people on the web — without the noise, algorithms, or ads of social media. They're built on an open standard (RSS and Atom) that's been around since the early days of the web, so anyone can follow any site that publishes one. To give you a glimpse into that world, below is a list of blogging heroes to start with, with their newest posts.

Want your own list? Pick up a feed reader app like NetNewsWire, or a service like blogsareback.com, and gather the websites you like — new posts just show up.

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Maggie Appleton

Maggie Appleton, designer-anthropologist and Staff Research Engineer at GitHub Next. Illustrated essays on digital gardens, end-user programming, and how AI is reshaping software and design. She is also a mum now.

Austin Kleon

A bestselling author and illustrator ("a writer who draws") known for Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going. Writes about creativity, making art in public, and sustaining a creative practice.

  • Weep to water the trees (a mixtape) Here’s a new mixtape, which was really inspired by me being depressed and watching Deerhunter do “Nothing Ever Happened” live in 2011 and getting really obsessed with the late Josh Fauver’s short scale bass. (The title comes from one of my favorite Bob Pollard lyrics: “I climb up on the house / weep to water […]
  • Typewriter interview with Vijay Gupta The latest typewriter interview is with violinist and author Vijay Gupta. A reader said he wished I’d included audio of the musical notation, but I think it’s a nice little treat for those of us who’ve spent years learning to read music. Walk yourself over to your instrument and check them out for yourself!
  • Prince of analogue Mark Haddon let it slip on his Instagram that he’s working on a typewriter interview for me: before i even get started i need to celebrate the questions which are a) some of the best i’ve ever been asked (swipe for a selection) b) arrive *in the post* and c) come with a fabulous hand-made […]
  • Typewriter interview with Jennifer Daniel Jennifer Daniel did not accept the analog constraints of the typewriter interview, and that’s what made this one extra great.
  • In a (summer) funk (a mixtape) Every Friday night around 5PM, before I’m about to make our pizza night martinis, I turn on KUTX and listen to “Old School Dance Party” — the “Happy Feet Dance Party with ever-lovin’ John E. Dee playing the music that got you in trouble.”  (More recently, Confucius Jones has been taking over as host.) One […]

Derek Sivers

Former touring musician who founded CD Baby, then became a writer and speaker after selling it. Publishes short, sharp essays on decision-making, philosophy, and independent thinking — "100% him, no AI."

  • tweet 17 conversations in Jakarta, Indonesia: https://sive.rs/met/at-14
  • tweet 16 conversations in super-multicultural Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur: https://sive.rs/met/at-13
  • tweet India tech friends: I just bought my ticket to IndiaFOSS in BLR Sept 26-27: https://fossunited.org/indiafoss/2026 Want to meet? Email me: https://sive.rs/contact
  • Writing for Emotional Impact - by Karl Iglesias About the craft of writing a great film screenplay. A bit tedious (with sloppy repetitive writing) but I always love these books for making me see the craft behind movies I know well, and pointing out how to use this craft to make better stories in any medium.
  • tweet Fight Club: I liked it the first time years ago, but watching a second time when you already know the end reveal? Elevates it from good to great. So many brilliant details in the screenplay. What else in life is better the second time?

Robin Sloan – Dragoncatcher the blog

The "lab notebook" of novelist Robin Sloan (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Moonbound). Conversational, intellectually curious posts on AI, computing history, creative coding, and the culture of tech.

Frank Chimero

New York-based designer and creative director and author of The Shape of Design. Writes essays on design philosophy, craft, and the tension between technology and creativity.

  • Beyond the Machine Extras Every talk leaves a lot of scraps, and Beyond the Machine is no exception. I read a couple books, watched about 20 hours of interviews with Brian Eno, listened to 10 hours of podcasts with Rick Rubin to make sure I wasn’t being uncharitable. (One podcast was a discussion between Rubin and Eno. A really nice listen!) I clocked some serious headphone time with Holly Herndon’s discography, which I’m
  • Beyond the Machine This talk was given on October 14, 2025 at Kinference in Brooklyn, New York. Spoiler alert: the last part of the talk covers plot points of the movie Spirited Away. Another warning is included right before the spoilers with a jump forward link to the spoiler-free conclusion. I am so tired of hearing about AI. Unfortunately, this is a talk about AI. I’m trying to figure out how to use generative AI
  • Selling Lemons I’ve been researching a new talk the last few weeks and along the way stumbled across a concept that’s been rattling around in my head. I am writing to share, because I find it a satisfying description for the tech flop era. The idea is called “a market for lemons.” The phrase comes from a 1970 paper by George Akerlof that explains how information asymmetry between buyers and sellers can undermine
  • Eel-evation Today, I learned that eels are fish. This was a disappointment. I knew of fish, I knew of snakes, yet I always assumed eels were some secret third thing. But, nope, they’re just fish. Or are they? A little digging revealed that eels are deeply weird fish, and to my great satisfaction, the secrets I sensed in them run stranger and deeper than their “fish” label suggests. Since you’ve made it this f
  • Time is On My Side Ah, summer, my worst season. Summer and I do not get along. Too much heat, too much light, too much noise, too much cultural baggage. I burn, I sweat, I fester, I sulk. Which is why it came as a surprise that I took the summer for myself. I quit my job at an opportune moment and called it a sabbatical. My intentions were simple enough: step away from Zoom, Slack, quarterly planning, performance re

Matt Webb – Interconnected

Matt Webb's long-running blog (since 2000) on technology, AI, product design, and culture — observational, slightly wry, often connecting gadgets and software to bigger ideas about communication.

  • Factories are just rooms I went into my kid’s school a couple months back and spoke to the year group about manufacturing. Honestly it was the most rewarding speaking gig I’ve done all year. It was about the process of making my AI clock and I have a ton of pics from my factory visit to Shenzhen (mostly pics that I have only shared with Kickstarter backers). I talked about where ideas come from and the value of playing ar
  • Filtered for that which motivates form 1. It’s hot in London so I’ve been seeing a lot of handheld portable fans, usually with a strap so you can hang it round your neck. My faves are the ones with thermoelectric coolers in the middle of the fan: a small plate that is so cold that it is covered with icy condensation. It’s the Peltier effect (the plate is really hot on the back) and the first time I’ve seen a thermoelectric cooler in th
  • I am obsessed with these two ads I didn’t know what a near-infrared LED mask was a week ago, and now I am obsessed with this ad from Omnilux. Because there’s a lot going on. The aesthetic of the mask itself is wild: the lines look like sinews as if the woman has been flensed But the schematic flesh is commercial! The logo on the forehead! Yet she has glossy hair and a spa outfit And is drinking a glass of white wine?? Let’s not g
  • Wet thoughts Wet lab. “Wet lab” was a new term to me, I had to look it up – it’s a laboratory with chemicals where there’s spill risk etc. I have a physics background myself and the closest I came to liquids was liquid nitrogen, and when you spill that it just boils furiously and goes away. Don’t do this: if you put your open hand into a dewar of liquid nitrogen, you can hold it under the liquid at -196C/-320F
  • Self-driving legs to walk me to the office When we end up voluntarily ceding control of our own body parts to AI (for example so we can automatically walk around the grocery story while simultaneously catching up on boxsets on a VR headset) I wonder what that will feel like. The underlying tech is currently in research phase. What I mean is that humanoid robots are coming (as previously discussed). And while robots are a mechanical challen

kottke.org

Jason Kottke's site — one of the oldest blogs on the web (1998) and a pioneer of the permalink. Curated links and commentary spanning art, science, design, and culture.

  • This is neat: Robin Sloan is rewriting his 2009 short... This is neat: Robin Sloan is rewriting his 2009 short story, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. “The interplay between books and technology has changed since I wrote them…but also that I have become a different writer, and a better one.”
  • Stop chasing life goals and start trying tiny... Stop chasing life goals and start trying tiny experiments to learn from instead. “Chasing goals doesn’t work for life’s most important questions — career, relationships, health. It’s like locking in your answer before you have understood the question.”
  • What’s the Point of Sex, Anyway? “There is yet... What’s the Point of Sex, Anyway? “There is yet another kind of male, known among ichthyologists as a ‘sneaky mater.’ This type dispenses altogether with nest-building and partnering and simply darts around squirting.”
  • How a Differential Gear Works I’ve posted this before, but it’s so good, here it is again: a super-simple explanation of why differential gears are necessary in cars and how they work. (via @stevenstrogatz) [This is a vintage post originally from Apr 2013.] Tags: cars · science · video
  • The Open Source AI Gap Map shows the current... The Open Source AI Gap Map shows the current capabilities of open source AI tools with an eye toward answering an important question: “What building blocks are missing for creating completely open source AI products?”

Matthias Ott

Independent web design engineer based in Stuttgart, teaching interface prototyping at Muthesius Academy. Writes about personal websites, owning your data and web technologies.

  • Ad Infinitum At Google I/O this week, the company announced the biggest change to Search in 25 years. The ten blue links? Gone. Instead, you get — first at times? soon always? — “generative UI”, an “intelligent search box” with custom interactive widgets, built on the fly by Gemini. You get “information agents” that monitor the web for you around the clock. You get mini-apps you can build right inside the sear
  • Lazy and Prompt Chrome 148 shipped this week, and in the release notes you’ll find one of the best things to happen to web performance in a long time: loading="lazy" for <video> and <audio> elements. Scott Jehl, an engineer at Squarespace focusing on performance and accessibility, has been the driving force behind this. Scott and a small team of engineers proposed the spec change, wrote the
  • Buckle Up You might know that I – with the generous help from Brandon Kelly on the Craft 5 version – wrote and maintain a Webmention plugin for Craft CMS. Today, I shipped version 1.3.0. It’s a security and abuse hardening release, and if you’re running the plugin, you should upgrade. The backstory of this one is, at least to me, kind of interesting. Back in March, I added a new feature to the plugin: a Fai
  • At Machine Speed Yesterday, I opened Discord to a message from my friend Bastian Allgeier that I had never quite seen in all the years I’ve been building sites with his Kirby CMS. “Today we are releasing our biggest security release in the last 14+ years,” Bastian wrote. “The last few weeks have been intense, to say the least. We received 8 reports within just a couple of days.” Six of those eight security reports
  • Design and Engineering, As One In the winter of 1898, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor arrived at the Bethlehem Steel Company in Pennsylvania with a stopwatch and a conviction. Taylor had been thinking for years about why industrial work was so inefficient, and he believed he had found the answer: the problem was that the people who did the work were also the people who decided how to do it. Workers brought

People and Blogs — Zachary Kai

"People & Blogs" interview series, started by Manuel Moreale, now taken over by Zachary Kai. Each entry is a conversation with an independent blogger about their site, process, and reasons for keeping a personal corner of the web.

  • People and Blogs: Andy Baio People and Blogs is a series by Manuel Moreale featuring the people behind personal blogs and the stories of their corners of the web. This conversation is with Andy Baio. Do go visit his blog and say...
  • People and Blogs: Anne Lee Steele People and Blogs is a series by Manuel Moreale featuring the people behind personal blogs and the stories of their corners of the web. This conversation is with Anne Lee Steele. Do go visit their blog...
  • People and Blogs: Edoardo People and Blogs is a series by Manuel Moreale featuring the people behind personal blogs and the stories of their corners of the web. This conversation is with Edoardo. Do go visit their blog and say...
  • People and Blogs: Carl Barenbrug People and Blogs is a series by Manuel Moreale featuring the people behind personal blogs and the stories of their corners of the web. This conversation is with Carl Barenbrug. Do go visit their blog ...
  • People and Blogs: Barry Hess People and Blogs is a series by Manuel Moreale featuring the people behind personal blogs and the stories of their corners of the web. This conversation is with Barry Hess. Do go visit their blog and ...

David Cain – Raptitude

David Cain's personal development blog, written from Winnipeg, Canada since 2009. Practical, reflective essays on emotional skills, mindfulness, and "getting better at being human."

  • The Answer to Every Problem I’m pretty sure the best answer to every problem can be encapsulated in one simple dictum. You can use this dictum to meet all your problems, regardless of what they are, and create the best possible outcomes. You’re not going to like it. It has different forms, but here’s one: Do what has to be done, when it has to […]
  • Do Things You’ll Love Yourself For The night before you travel somewhere, order your favorite pizza, eat some of it for dinner, and seal the rest in a bag and put it in the freezer. A week later, when you get home unexpectedly late, wiped out and ravenous, you’ll open your fridge to find only eggs, pickles, and condiments. Then, you’ll remember that your favorite pizza […]
  • How to Just Do a Thing I keep reading books from the 19th century and earlier, fiction and nonfiction, because I envy something about the lives of the people in them. I don’t think I’d want to trade places. I’m too accustomed to hot showers and modern dentistry. But people back then seemed to live with a certain straightforwardness we no longer have. They could more […]
  • Count Your Blessings, but Count Carefully I’m obsessed with the idea that a guy who wears jeans and drives a Jeep today is basically the same creature that wore animal skins and lived on hand-caught river fish 20,000 years ago. Those beings had the same basic physical and emotional needs, but had to meet them with very few tools and amenities. I’ve previously described my favorite […]
  • Social Media is the Opposite of Social Life I remember a surreal moment about twenty years ago, which felt like the beginning of something bad, and it was. I was at a bowling alley with some friends, and a few people in our group were talking about Facebook. I knew what it was but had no interest in it. Then one of them turned to me and said, […]

Robin Rendle

Software designer (currently at Apple, formerly staff writer at CSS-Tricks) writing 900+ essays that treat the web as a publishing medium. Covers CSS, design systems, typography, and cultural commentary on tech.

  • Several short sentences about writing This is the sort of book I usually hate. By law books about writing are so desperate to explain the world to me that I struggle to keep my eyes open. I don’t have much patience when I feel someone’s talking down to me, with them having figured the universe out already. Isn’t it always more exciting when a writer is on the tip of their toes just a half step ahead of you? When you’re invited to part
  • Make Believe This morning was a total stinker. I woke up with a dull headache, teeth grinding, fists clenched. Sometimes my body becomes haunted, a vessel for a thing; total and all consuming. It could be a conversation the day before or a problem I’m trying to solve, it doesn’t really matter what that the thing is. These moments suck because it feels like I’m trapped inside my body with no way out but it’s ex
  • Indian Street Lettering I have a terrible admission to make and you may never forgive me. It’s taken far too long, so please don’t be mean about this. Look, I’m already on my knees apologizing and you don’t have to make this weird, okay? But this weekend I finally got my copy of Indian Street Lettering by Pooja Saxena. I know! I’m sorry! I should have known sooner! I apologized already! Jeez! Pooja’s fantastic book and e
  • fragcoord.xyz Huh: FragCoord is a real-time GLSL fragment shader editor. Write shader code on the left, see the result rendered instantly on the right. No setup required — just start typing. That’s from the docs that explains how this website is Codepen but for shaders. Each example is hypnotic and fun but from a totally different universe where math and art were always the same class in high school. There’s a
  • The Wave Alessandra Ram: Every major technological boom has produced the same figure, the person who gives everything to the wave...