“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax– Of cabbages–and kings– And why the sea is boiling hot– And whether pigs have wings.”
The Walrus and The Carpenter by Lewis Carroll
The first Weekend Reading was posted on 16th May 2015; the idea spun out of a series I used to compile for my ‘other’ blog (which has since been closed and rolled into this one), where I would post a list of the most interesting technical communications and design articles I’d read that week. When I closed that blog down, and changed careers, I started finding other sources and articles and it seemed obvious to pick up where I’d left off, just with a more general interest world view (well, my general interests, and my world view, but hey this is my blog!).
I’ve always been a big reader and in the early days of the internet email newsletters were a great way to hear about new sites that had started up and, even though we were all excited about this new fangled thing called weblogging, it turns out the step from IRC groups to common interest newsletters wasn’t much of a leap.
Fast forward many years and my last change of jobs meant a commute as a passenger and, with an extra hour each day, I started to seek out other sources to widen my reading ‘filter’ and stumbled across a few sources that I still read to this day (links below) and which have provided the majority of the links I’ve shared.
Where previously I’d hand-crafted each post for the old blog, starting up Weekend Reading on this site gave me a chance to get my geek on!. I created a little automated workflow that took the articles I added to Pocket, fed them through IFTTT to a text file on Dropbox, with that file picked up by a ‘Workflow’ (now Shortcuts app) routine that would search and replace various HTML tags, before creating a draft post ready for me to add my comments too.
And so it was for the last couple of years; Through the week any articles I wanted to share with you were add to my Pocket account and on a Friday I ran the ‘shortcut’ to populate the list of links, with a placeholder “comment” ready for me to edit. Simple.
3 years and 161 posts later and I think it’s time to admit that this is now more of a chore than I’d like. Sure it’s all automated, but over the past few months I’ve started searching out and filtering what I read knowing that it will appear in these posts, and that’s not why I’m doing it. It isn’t supposed to be a chore, it’s just supposed to be an extension of what I already read, and it no longer is.
As always, this may not be a permanent goodbye, but equally I’m aware that a hiatus can quickly become the norm so, for now, presume there won’t be any more Weekend Reading posts.
To everyone who read them, who commented and replied, I hope you enjoyed them as much as I did. And don’t worry, I’m not leaving you high and dry for, without doubt, Weekend Reading would not have existed, nor been as electic, if not for the following websites and newsletters, I heartily recommend you subscribe to them:
And, with that, I will wish you all a wonderful 2019 when it arrives. So long, and thanks for all the fish!
P.S. If you still wanna see what I’m reading, you can follow along via your favourite RSS reader – here’s the link to my Pocket feed. (caveat: I use this to capture all sorts of articles, recipes, gift ideas and more).
