Last night I noticed the dilapidated state of my sidebar links. “Who uses them anyway?”, I thought, before answering myself with, “Me!”

In order of finding new blogs, the first and most common is from someone I already read who mentions another writer who may take my attention long enough to click through to their site. Getting from there to the ‘New Additions” folder in my RSS Reader (now using the quite beautiful yet assuredly beta Reeder), is a rarity, and from there to my sidebar is … well there’s scant connection really, it’s a rare thing when I go through all the links and add/subtract, and even then, with 300 or so in my news feed, my sidebar is only a few I like a lot.

So I added and subtracted. As usual, some blogs I loved very much have withered and passed the deadline of no longer updated (around 3 months before promotion to my ‘Dinasaurs’ folder), others have moved. Many new ones have arrived.

Excitement! I’ll not list all the new ones here, but there are a few, notably in ‘Art and Theatre Blogs’, as well as in ‘Asia and Central Asia Blogs’ and in the sciences categories. As for the ones that vanished …

I removed two sections. One for design as this stuff has moved mostly to my other blog (thingswithbits.info) and I don’t really get so enthusiastic about design as I do about, say, Central Asia or Kepler objects. The other to go, which is little more difficult to explain is the category for Trans* Queer Feminism stuff.

Without going into too much detail, there are still blogs I read in this field, but I find what turns up on these blogs is either irrelevant to me (e.g. cat blogging), the quality of writing does not have a level of rigorousness I find in other blogs I admire, or too often they are simply too American-centric. I’m also not so interested in spending a day in the echo-chamber finding the rare blog I would read.

So, for those who suffer distress when I blog infrequently, the sidebar should now assist you in feeling as I do most mornings: inspired by brilliant and passionate writers.