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.

Update feeds Last update

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.

  • What happens when a character says the title of the movie Phillip Maciak: There is something absurd about hearing a character in a movie utter the title of the movie they’re in out loud. It’s a moment that can be played for laughs, but it’s just as hard not to smirk when a film that takes itself seriously calls itself by its own name. Many filmmakers […]
  • A shortage of fun I found this diary comic from (checks notes) five years ago. In last Friday’s newsletter, I wrote: In the “Who’s having fun?” section of Don’t Call It Art, I quote Ed Emberley saying, “I am determined to have fun doing my work… if I’m enjoying myself then that feeling is passed on to the reader.” […]
  • It’s very difficult to be very lazy “It’s very difficult to be very lazy. It takes a lot of imagination to do nothing and you have to be sufficiently self-confident not to have a bad conscience. You have to have a taste for life, so that every minute is complete in itself and so you don’t have to keep saying ‘I’ve done […]
  • 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!

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.

  • Frozen 2 should be rated R I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off which was as great as I remember. It has an age rating of PG-13 in the US and 15 in the UK for bad language and some kissing. (There is also lying to parents but apparently that doesn’t count.) This seems absurd. I have way less problem with some light cursing/petting than films that are ostensibly for kids like cartoons and superhero movies that treat mass exist
  • Examples from sci-fi of voice interfaces that stay on task I wonder how you would design a really single-minded voice UI? Like, voice interfaces are really good now because of AI. But they’re so unbounded. If you’re having a voice interaction with a computer or with a device, you could end up having a conversation about anything. And while a voice UI is great within a domain, do you really want to be gossiping about movies or having a psychotherapy sessio
  • 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

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.

  • TV Appearance of Lincoln Assassination Witness In 1956, 96-year-old Samuel Seymour appeared on a game show called I’ve Got A Secret…his secret was that he saw Lincoln’s assassination when he was five years old. Mind-blowing…the Civil War & Lincoln’s assassination directly linked to something as modern as a TV game show. Two years earlier, Seymour gave an interview about witnessing the assassination. His father, an overseer on a Maryland estate
  • What Training My Chaotic Dog Taught Me About Power,... What Training My Chaotic Dog Taught Me About Power, Control — and Human Beings. “As any parent of a toddler knows, being morally liable for something that is incapable of moral liability is a fraught and stressful business.”
  • Building a World Map With Only 500 Bytes . Building a World Map With Only 500 Bytes.
  • How Are Memories Stored Inside Your Brain? This video from Kurzgesagt is a great little primer on how the human brain stores memories. Memory is one of the strangest abilities you possess. Your brain uses an incredibly complex biological system to preserve moments from your past that no longer exist, allowing you to revisit experiences from years ago. But memories are not always recordings of reality. In fact, every time a memory comes und
  • From the Brooklyn Public Library, a list of “the... From the Brooklyn Public Library, a list of “the 250 most influential books in United States history”. Incl. Neuromancer, The Fire Next Time, Nickel and Dimed, The Power Broker, and The Snowy Day.

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: Brennan Kenneth Brown 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 Brennan Kenneth Brown. Do go visit ...
  • People and Blogs: Zachary Kai People and Blogs is a series founded by Manuel Moreale featuring the people behind personal blogs and the stories of their corners of the web. This conversation — the last one Manu conducted before ...
  • 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...

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."

  • Failing is Common, Trying is Rare When you die, you appear before a studio audience and they give you a standing ovation. The host then interviews you about your great successes and misses in life. One thing you realize, when they review the footage, is that you didn’t really try most of the time. You thought you had tried and failed to learn a second language, […]
  • 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 […]

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.

  • Sinistral Hands There’s a line from Rutherford Craze’s latest note that hit me like a piano tumbling out of a six story building: When we ask Midjourney to draw an ox, it does not think of home. ChatGPT will never invent a new calligraphy technique, because it has no wrists to feel uncomfortable. That link points to Phaedra Charles’s Undercase Type and a beautiful thing she printed called A Guide to Sinistral Han
  • EP-1320 Medieval Last week I picked up the EP-1320 Medieval and I’ve been tinkering with it all weekend. Besides it’s buck-wild look, it comes with a bunch of expertly recorded medieval samples: flutes, bowed harps, gitterns, reeds, trumpets, bells, battle toms, rowdy peasants, and coconut horse hooves. This makes it sound like a joke, a musical toy that immediately finds itself in the back of your closet, but wha
  • 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