One of my favourite blogs is John Gruber's Daring Fireball.

Right now, in the middle of Apple season, when the rumour, guesses and speculation have turned into reactions and informed opinions (but still mainly from people who haven't ever seen, held or used the actual object they are talking about), his site is the first one I turn to for an informed and educated view of what's going on before I try to put together my own views. Not just for his own thoughts, but as a signpost to others' views that are worth reading.

I read a lot of stuff online, from personal blogs to professional websites, but looking through at the stuff that inspires me to write or post something myself, I notice that a lot of it comes from Daring Fireball.

Partly, that's probably a personal thing– because about 70% of the things I bookmark to post about get dropped, simply because it's a lot more effort to comment on something you disagree with than something you don't. But John Gruber tends to link to things that are interesting and exciting, rather than annoying or frustrating.

Sometimes it's his own original posts, sometimes it's stuff that he links to (which I try to credit as having arrived at via Daring Fireball, but my web browsing habit of having several dozen pages open at any given time across a number of web browsers on 3 different devices means that I don't always know how I got to a particular web page.)

There's also a site design influence; after a bit (well, quite a lot, as I had to figure out a lot of what I was doing as I went along) of fiddling around with Drupal's template files (and ) I've deliberately copied his style of posting links directly to other stories with my own comments, rather than writing something that links to a page of it's own on my site, with quotations lifted from the original story and a link to the source of the idea hidden somewhere in the text. (At some point, I hope to figure out a way to make it visually clearer where I'm writing my own things and where I'm commenting on something else, but I'm not sure how to make that any clearer and simpler than Gruber's own solution– which I'm uncomfortable with simply copying outright.)

So I just thought it was worth making a little note of that fact, and suggesting that if you're interested in computers, technology, design, the world of Digital, and just generally cool stuff with a slightly nerdy/geeky slant, that you follow his website. (And to be honest, if you're not interested in any of that kind of stuff then I'm not really sure what you're doing here at SomeRandomNerd.com...)