Thursday, March 25, 2010

My five favorite blogs

I have around 100 blogs on my Google Reader, so it's safe to say that I spend a lot of time reading them. A lot of them are more "visual" blogs - fashion, interior, design, cooking blogs. What can I say - I like to look at pretty things.

But there are a handful of blogs on my Google Reader which get me all giddy when I see that they have been updated. Here is a list - maybe you'll find a new favorite blog there too:

Post Secret is an ongoing art project in which people send in their secrets on a post card. I have been reading this blog for about six years now and I support it by buying post secret books for friends and family as gifts. It sounds like a silly blog but it does so much - showing people that they are not alone.

I only started reading Jezebel a few months ago but it's already one of my favorites. It is a feminist website which discusses everything from politics to celebrities and fashion. The discussions remind me of the discussions I used to have with my friends out in Amsterdam. The comments are moderated and to be a commenter you have to "prove yourself" by delivering a few funny, interesting, smart comments. If the moderators like your style (which doesn't have to mean that they agree with your opinion), your comments will be approved and you can become a commenter. This is one of the few politically minded websites where I actually read the comments.

Ok, here is a little secret - I am a nail polish fanatic. And there are lots of us out there. There are even blogs where people take pictures of their nails (I might have been known to do that myself sometimes ...) and post them on their blogs. In fact, there are very many blogs like that. And I have a lot of them on my Google Reader. With most of the blogs, I just look at the pictures. If I really like a color, I will read what people wrote about it. But I almost always read the blog posts on Polish or Perish - a blog written by seven PHD/Masters students who are all nail obsessed like me. They write about nail polish but also about how their studies are going and their personal lives. My favorite is "Kittytokaren" - her name is a Cake reference and at least in the beginning a lot of her blog posts had Cake references in them. And Cake happens to be one of my very favorite bands.

I read a lot of cooking blogs - especially since I started cutting out processed foods and eating organic/locally/seasonally. There is just something comforting about reading cooking blogs. There are never any nasty comments on their posts. The pictures look beautiful. And to see what people cook is like getting a peak into their personal life. The Kitchn is a bit different. It is part of Apartment Therapy (which I read long before I discovered The Kitchn). It's written by several people. It is not a very personal blog. Recipes are only a small part of the posts on The Kitchn. There are posts and video tutorials about how to properly cut onions, how to take a whole chicken apart, how to re-finish cast iron skillets, ... I also love the posts where readers ask a question and the commenters answer - I have learned more about cooking from the comments on The Kitchn (which I have only been reading for about two months) than I learned in my 4 years of home ed classes in high school.


Kimberly Miller is a smart, cute, young actress/writer from New York who posts pictures of everything she eats. That is pretty much it in a nutshell but she also writes about her personal life, her life in New York, her fitness challenges, ... I first started reading her when she was one of the writers of "Elastic Waist" - a blog that unfortunately doesn't exist anymore (if it would, it would be on this list). When Elastic Waist folded (they were sponsored by Self magazine and I guess the magazine was making cuts), all the writers posted their personal websites and that's how I came to read The Kim Challenge. Not only is it interesting to see what other people (who have similar food principles to myself) eat every day but I have also come to really like Kim personally. Yes kids, this is 2010 and now we read peoples blogs and feel like they are our friends even though they might know that we exist.

I know the people who read my blog are not really avid commenters but if you'd like to come out of the lurking status, please let me know what your favorite blogs are! Because my Google Reader is always open for new additions!

6 comments:

contrarybear said...

I like:

Joe Posnanski for sports
http://joeposnanski.com/JoeBlog/

Tom Chick for video games
http://fidgit.com/

Achewood and XKCD for webcomics:
http://www.achewood.com/
http://www.xkcd.com/

Dilbert blog for general nuttiness:
http://dilbert.com/blog

(and your blog of course)

Marie said...

An old favorite: Tomato Nation: http://tomatonation.com/

And you seem to know one Girl Who Ate Everything, but there's another one, a girl in NY who writes about going out to eat and it's total food porn: http://www.roboppy.net/food/

The Austrian said...

Thank you Marie! I know the other one two actually but I haven't read it that much and I don't know Tomato Nation at all - I'll check them both out!

Marie said...

I sort of miss the old Tomato Nation days when she wrote longer stories, both non-fiction and fiction, but they're still there in the archives. Anything to do with her family or cats is brilliant. Like this one about when she got a Roomba: http://tinyurl.com/y8rskqd. Classic. Or this one about playing ping-pong with her brother (aka Mr. Stupidhead) when on holiday: http://tinyurl.com/yldw38d. At least she still does her advice column, The Vine, which I have learned so much from. All you need to know in life you can learn from Sars and Dan Savage.

Katrina said...

I <3 The Kim Challenge too, but The Pink of Perfection is my all-time favourite blog. I think the writer was the editor of Elastic Waist or something. It just makes my day when I see she has updated!

Kim said...

Thanks so much for listing me as one of your favorites. It sounds silly, but do always sort of feel like I know my readers, well at least the ones that comment regularly (you included). Sometimes I think about writing to them when I travel and seeing if they want to meet up--but then I think I'd be creepy. Anyway, thanks again.

Katrina: I get excited when Sarah updates Pink of Perfection too--it always makes me feel like the world is a little prettier.