My ASP.NET news sources
I just posted about the ASP.NET Daily Community Spotlight. I was going to list a bunch of my news sources at the end, but figured this deserves a separate post. I've been following a lot of development blogs for a long time - for a while I subscribed to over 1500 feeds and read them all. That doesn't scale very well, though, and it's really time consuming. Since the community spotlight requires an interesting ASP.NET post every day of the year, I've come up with a few sources of ASP.NET news.
Top Link Blogs
Chris Alcock's The Morning Brew is a must-read blog which highlights each day's best blog posts across the .NET community. He covers the entire Microsoft development, but generally any of the top ASP.NET posts I see either have already been listed on The Morning Brew or will be there soon.
Elijah Manor posts a lot of great content, which is available in his Twitter feed at @elijahmanor, on his Delicious feed, and on a dedicated website - Web Dev Tweets.
While not 100% ASP.NET focused, I've been appreciating Joe Stagner's Weekly Links series, partly since he includes a lot of links that don't show up on my other lists.
Twitter
Over the past few years, I've been getting more and more of my information from my Twitter network (as opposed to RSS or other means). Twitter is as good as your network, so if getting good information off Twitter sounds crazy, you're probably not following the right people. I already mentioned Elijah Manor (@elijahmanor). I follow over a thousand people on Twitter, so I'm not going to try to pick and choose a list, but one good way to get started building out a Twitter network is to follow active Twitter users on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft:
- @scottgu (well, not on the ASP.NET team, but their great grand boss, and always a great source of ASP.NET info)
- @shanselman
- @haacked
- @bradwilson
- @davidfowl
- @InfinitiesLoop
- @davidebbo
- @marcind
- @DamianEdwards
- @stevensanderson
- @bleroy
- @humancompiler
- @osbornm
- @anurse
- @coolcsh
I'm sure I'm missing a few, and I'll update the list.
Building a Twitter network that follows topics you're interested in allows you to use other tools like Cadmus to automatically summarize top content by leveraging the collective input of many users.
Twitter Search with Topsy
You can search Twitter for hashtags (like #aspnet, #aspnetmvc, and #webmatrix) to get a raw view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Twitter's search is pretty poor; I prefer Topsy. Here's an example search for the #aspnetmvc hashtag:
http://topsy.com/s?q=%23aspnetmvc
You can also do combined queries for several tags:
http://topsy.com/s?q=%23aspnetmvc+OR+%23aspnet+OR+%23webmatrix
Paper.li
Paper.li is a handy service that builds a custom daily newspaper based on your social network. They've turned a lot of people off by automatically tweeting "The SuperDevFoo Daily is out!!!" messages (which can be turned off), but if you're ignoring them because of those message, you're missing out on a handy, free service.
My paper.li page includes content across a lot of interests, including ASP.NET: http://paper.li/jongalloway
When I want to drill into a specific tag, though, I'll just look at the Paper.li post for that hashtag. For example, here's the #aspnetmvc paper.li page: http://paper.li/tag/aspnetmvc
Delicious
I mentioned previously that I use Delicious for managing site links. I also use their network and search features. The tag based search is pretty good:
Even better, though, is that I can see who's bookmarked these links, and add them to my Delicious network. After having built out a network, I can optimize by doing less searching and more leaching leveraging of collective intelligence.
Community Sites
I scan DotNetKicks, the weblogs.asp.net combined feed, and the ASP.NET Community page, CodeBetter, Los Techies, CodeProject, and DotNetSlackers from time to time. They're hit and miss, but they do offer more of an opportunity for finding original content which others may have missed.
Terms of Enrampagement
When someone's on a tear, I just manually check their sites more often. I could use RSS for that, but it changes pretty often. I just keep a mental note of people who are cranking out a lot of good content and check their sites more often.
What works for you?