When I first started blogging I had even less idea of what to do than I do now. So I copied other bloggers. It’s probably fair to say that the blogger I copied most was Tim Challies. There were a few reasons for this, one his blog was read by hundreds of thousands of people and I had unrealistic ambitions. There were also similar interests in book reviewing and more relevantly, interesting stuff from all over the internet.

I am, by nature, curious. I have an appetite for interesting and fascinating articles from a wide range of topics and sharing what I found interesting seemed like a good idea.

Tim (who I do not know and have not met) daily publishes something he calls A La Carte (which I think is a brilliant name for it) which is just a collection of links to things he has found interesting the day before. I loved that idea so much I copied it.

On this blog you’ll find several hundred posts similar to that. I tried I link therefore I am before eventually settling on the more mundane Miscellaneous. Then Twitter arrived and I began using social media as a more effective way (so I thought) of sharing links. A couple of years ago, I stopped posting them on this blog.

At that time, my writing and creativity had dried up a little and just using this for sharing other people’s stuff seemed, well, not enough. Recently, I began to wonder if I shouldn’t go back to sharing the links as they’re consistently shared dozens and sometimes hundreds of times across social media, so why not collect the best of those here again.

Once again, right on cue, Tim wrote about his own blog and A La Carte. He says,

I understood that I could be a bigger blessing to those who read my site by pointing them elsewhere

That made sense to me. I shared his love of curating good content and interesting things and I was still doing it, just not here. So it’s time to bring it back. I need to work at creating and not just curating but I now see it’s OK to do both.

Several people I know do something similar, so here are some of my favourites

• Tim Challies and A La Carte
• Mark Meynell’s Treasure Maps
• Jeremy Williams’ What we learned this week
• Luke Davydaitis Weekly summary
• Wired’s Wired Awake
• Jake Belder (has interestingly gone in the other direction) but his links are on a Tumblr blog