Staying on top of the new technologies and features in web development can be difficult. The volume of information being generated is vast, and I have found myself becoming discouraged when I can’t seem to keep up.

The primary ways I stay on top of the community are Twitter, selected newsletters (e.g., Ruby Weekly), and blogs.

Blogs are great, but they pile up quickly. However, I’ve found a compromise that works for me: my Blog A-List.

In the past, I would subscribe to any blog that seemed to produce interesting content. In my feed reader, I tagged them all as “technical.”

However, after a few days of being busy with client work or a vacation, the “technical” tag would balloon to hundreds of posts. I’d regularly have to declare RSS bankrupcy and mark everything as read.

This bothered me because I felt like while I could have skipped a lot of content I wouldn’t have read anyway, I might have missed out on some things that would have benefited me greatly.

Enter the “a-list” tag.