🔗 Websites I Recommend
listing
Ido Perlmuter
First published:
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Last
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Table of Contents
- Traveling
- Software Engineering
- Computers, Tech, Software
- News, Browsing and Web Discovery
- DIY: Food, Beer Brewing, Gardening
- Music (either making or listening)
- Literature
- Miscellaneous
- Update Log
Traveling
- OneBag: an incredible guide for traveling the world with nothing but a carry-on. Written by Doug Dyment, this website was instrumental to my development as a traveler. While it is not updated often, it remains a fantastic source of information.
- The Man in Seat 61: Mark Smith's website dedicated to traveling the world via trains (and maybe a ferry or two). It is an extremely comprehensive work with guides and information for almost every train on Earth. It is constantly updated, and makes terrific points for choosing to forgo air travel, which has become more and more onerous through the years.
- Joe's Guide to Zion National Park: Joe Braun's website dedicated to Zion Nation Park in Utah, United States, is an amazing work of passion that I often recommend to would-be visitors of the park, especially those interested in hiking.
- BirdAndHike.com: Jim Boone's website dedicated to hiking, birding and other outdoor activities in the Las Vegas, NV area. I find that many people are unaware of just how much beautiful nature can be found a short drive from the city, but Jim's website also reaches as far as Utah and New Mexico.
- Travel Independent: another great guide for lightweight, efficient worldwide travel, including summaries for many countries and locations.
- NPS.gov: the website of the United States National Park Service is one of many reasons why I admire the agency so much. The NPS oversees over 400 units of nature preserves and protected areas of various designations. Their website is a wonderful way to discover these places, and provides a lot of information for each unit (especially the National Parks).
- Roadside America: this old-time website provides an incredibly large collection of attractions and sights to be found when road-tripping in the United States, from curious/funny signs up to full-blown attractions. There are also recommendations, ratings, pictures and more. The map feature is particularly useful.
Software Engineering
- MartinFowler.com: a world renowned software engineer, Martin Fowler's website is a font of information on practices, methodologies and concepts related to software development.
- Hacker News: I am often surprised by how this incredibly popular website remains not well known within the software engineering community in my country. Hacker News is a community driven news aggregator which specializes in computer science. It is a fantastic way to stay up to date with current trends and discuss related topics with other developers.
- DevDocs: an interface to read and search through the documentation of programming languages and related technologies. Quick and user-friendly, I use it on a daily basis.
- Web Browser Engineering: an online book describing in detail how web browsers are built and how they work.
- Changelog: a news website and podcast for developers.
- console.dev: weekly newsletter providing links and information about new developer tools.
- Julia Evans: Julia's blog contains easy to understand articles about software development, with an emphasis on Linux technologies. Her hand-drawn Wizard Zines—now hosted on a separate website—are fantastic.
Computers, Tech, Software (from a Usage Standpoint)
- Privacy Guides: a comprehensive directory of privacy-respecting software and services to replace the spyware we use on a daily basis.
- AnonAddy: create alias Email addresses you can give out to websites who promise not to spam you (but do anyway), and that you can cancel at any time.
- Web3 is going just great: a daily listing of stories of failure from the ridiculous world of cryptocurrencies, NFTs and related lies.
News, Browsing and Web Discovery
- Reddit: a social link/discussion website where content is submitted into specialized forums called "Subreddits." While its glory days are seemingly behind it, it remains a great source of information and content for many fields of interest. You can find Subreddits for anything and everything under the sun, frequented by people with a keen interest and knowledge of the subjects.
- RSS Discovery Engine: provides a way to discover websites by crawling RSS feeds of other websites.
- Popular Information: a newsletter with paid and free content. Their coverage of United States news is well written, interesting and reliable.
- DuckDuckGo: a feature-full, privacy-respecting search engine that puts that other search engine to shame.
DIY: Food, Beer Brewing, Gardening
- National Center for Home Food Preservation: everything you need to know about home food preservation.
- Serious Eats: a comprehensive resource for food making, with recipes, guides and much more.
- Brewer's Friend: apart from providing a blog, forum and online software for managing beer recipes, the website also contains a large collection of tools and calculators that are useful for beer brewing.
- Homebrew Talk: a large message board for everything related to beer brewing, including many recipes, and also including some lateral fields such as cheese making, meat curing and more.
- Homebrew Finds: a constantly updated listing of deals and discounts for homebrewing equipment and ingredients.
- Yarok (Hebrew): an organic nursery which sells in-season seedlings (and also seeds) at a low price, so you can grow your own vegetables (and fruits) at home.
Music (either making or listening)
- Tunefox.com: learn to play Bluegrass music on guitar, banjo and mandolin. This is a paid service, but there's some free content. Their play-along tablature is top-notch.
- myNoise: a large and growing collection of "noises" and soundscapes to listen to while working, learning, relaxing or sleeping, and to block out whatever sounds or thoughts are preventing you from successfully doing those things. Most soundscapes can only be unlocked by donating an amount of your choice to creator Dr. Ir. S. Pigeon. The soundscapes are of incredibly high quality, and users can tinker with different "channels" to modify each soundscape to their wishes. It is a lot more impressive than I can describe.
Literature
- Preston Jacobs: Preston's YouTube channel is mostly dedicated to George R. R. Martin's A World of Ice and Fire book series. His analyses are incredibly detailed, comprehensive, eye opening and enjoyable. I loved the books before I found Preston's channel, and I appreciate them a lot more since I did.
- The L-Space Web: a wonderful old-fashioned website dedicated to author Terry Pratchett and his Discworld book series.
Miscellaneous
- Zenni Optical: I don't know about the rest of the world, but the prices for prescription eyeglasses in Israel are highway robbery. Zenni Optical is extremely cheap and reliable, and their "Try On" feature, which allows you to see how the glasses will look on you, is fantastic. I've been a happy customer for quite a few years now.
Update Log
- 2023-08-28: Removed The Book Depository as it was shut down by Amazon.
- 2023-08-28: Removed Yesterweb as it has lost most of its content.