What's In My Feed Reader

As most of you already know, I greatly enjoy reading. Not only books, but a lot of blogs as well. And anyone who tries to follow multiple blogs will quickly realize that it's a pain to try to keep up with all of them. For this reason, I love feed readers! For those of you who have never used one, I highly recommend that you give it a try. If you have a Google account (and who doesn't?) then you already have a Google Reader account. All you have to do is set it up with all your blogs, and then you can check everything in one place and never miss a post. Reading all the stuff in my reader is how I start my day off everyday, and it's way better than any newspaper could ever be. In fact, it's like a newspaper customized to my exact interests.

I've also discovered that by keeping certain blogs as part of my daily routine helps me with staying focused in certain areas. When I follow a lot of personal finance blogs, I have more motivation to be wise with my finances. In the same way, when I follow DIY and home decorating blogs, I get a lot of motivation to tackle house projects. When I followed blogs on couponing back in the day I had some good success with couponing. So now if I'm lacking motivation in a certain area, I try to add some more blogs to my reader that fit into that category.

Some of my favorites...

DIY & Home Decor
Young House Love is the best DIY/home decor blog that I've ever read. It pretty much feels like you're talking to a friend about their home remodeling. Bower Power doesn’t have as many posts about DIY stuff, but I’ve been enjoying watching them settle into their new house.

Personal Finance
I used to subscribe to Get Rich Slowly and The Simple Dollar. I enjoyed these blogs more back in the day than I do now, but they're both still awesome personal finance sites. If you take the time to look at some of their old content you'll find some real gems too. I also really enjoy reading blogs about people aggressively working to pay off debt, particularly mortgages. One such blog that I recently stumbled across is Mortgage Free by 30.

Christian Stuff
Kevin DeYoung & Josh Harris are two popular authors that I like. DeYoung updates his blog daily, Josh Harris stopped updating his regularly.
Tim Challies - I discovered Challies because of his book reviews (Discerning Reader and all over Amazon), and his blog is one of my favorite Christian blogs to keep up with.
Boundless - Great website from Focus on the Family aimed at 20-somethings. Sadly, they aren’t writing new articles anymore, only re-posting old stuff. But Boundless will forever be one of my favorite sites for Christian content and they are still updating the blog.
girltalk - This one will only interest the ladies, and particularly those who are moms. But I enjoy it, and any blog devoted to Biblical womanhood is a nice addition to my news feed.

Geek Stuff
I stopped subscribing to geek stuff awhile back because I was ending up with too much stuff to read and had to trim something. But obviously Slashdot is one of the best, as well as the wide array of feeds available from CNET.

Craigslist Searches
When I’m looking for an item on Craigslist, I pop the URL from the search into my feed reader and stay on top of new listings that way. All you have to do is copy the URL from your browser and Google Reader will handle it all for you. Warning: This is not a good idea if your search terms are too general, as you’re likely to get overrun with tons of listings.

YouTube channels
If you’re like me and don’t like to subscribe to channels on YouTube itself, you can cheat the system a bit by adding a YouTube channel to your feed reader. This is useful if you have friends who have infrequently updated YouTube channels.
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users//uploads

People I Know
I have a lot of friends who have blogs and obviously these fall into a slightly different category than everything else I read. Since most people post rather sporadically on their blogs, I find using Google Reader essential. If I had to constantly check the multitude of blogs that my friends have for their updates that come once every other month, I never would. Or I'd get tired of checking certain ones and eventually miss out on a blog post when they did put one up.


And for those of you who already use a feed reader, or who decide to start using on in the near future, you should be sure to add this blog to your list. ;)

Fulfillment

"Our culture is constantly telling us to find our life; that we’re the center of our world, and as such, we need to take care of “me” first.

But when I’m the center of my world, my world becomes very small—because I’m the only person in it. When I try to find fulfillment in anything besides loving Christ and serving Him, I will only end up more frustrated and completely unfulfilled.

Now, don’t misunderstand. I think we as women should express our creativity, and even more importantly get sufficient rest. But the purpose of creativity should be to glorify God with our gifts, not to find “personal fulfillment,” and the goal of rest should be to strengthen us for service.

If we want “personal fulfillment" as women, we must not follow our culture’s prescription. Rather, we must lose our life for Christ's sake. Then, amazingly, we'll find that our world expands. We'll know the thrill of seeing the fruit of our sacrificial service in the lives of those around us."
-Carolyn Mahaney

Read the full blog post here