What Are Your Blog Resources?

Starting next week on Lorelle on WordPress, I will be sharing my blog resources with my readers. Your blog resources are the sites you visit frequently that help you blog. They are the bookmarks in your browser. The feeds in your feed reader.

While preparing my huge list of blog resources, I made some interesting discoveries about how I blog, what I blog about, and what resources I return to regularly for inspiration and fact checking.

I’ve been blogging for 14 years and have accumulated a huge wealth of resources. Over the years, the list has changed as some sites have come and gone, or new and improved resources replaced them on my lists. Some have stayed on the list, which is also surprising, considering how fast things change on the web.

Yahoo was the first search engine of choice, combined with Open Directory Project aka DMOZ, the yellow pages of the web in its earliest days. Today, everything is about Google, from search to email to spreadsheets. Sometimes I think they are replacing Microsoft in the monopoly of my online life.

The World Wide Web Consortium and The Webmaster’s Reference Library have been around about as long as I have and I continue to reference them. Yet, I’m somehow always surprised when I stumble across them in my searches with the thought, “Oh, they’re still around!” I wonder if anyone who works for them thinks the same thing about me?

I tried the earliest online versions of Britannica Online but they wanted registration and money to get to any of the good stuff. Wikipedia came to my rescue in the early days as a great resource for digging up research information. Now, Britannica and other online encyclopedias are smarter about what they share, and there are now more resources for research information to choose from.

I also took time to update a few of my other online resources, finding a few new ones to add to the options I use to do my blog research, such as finding new resources for online encyclopedias and references.

For example, I’ve been accessing information through my library’s online site, but I found plenty of library access material via The Internet Public Library, Librarians’ Internet Index, The Awesome Library, and Virtual Private Library.

I also took time to update my research on copyright issues to cover a more global perspective and found Internet Law Web, Laws of Nations of the World, Journalism Internet Resources on Media Law, and Intellectual Property Law and Technology: Copyrights, Trademarks, and Patents to add to my resource list.

See Also

Old Blogging Sites That We Thought were Gone

I blog about blogging and WordPress, so I have a vast collection of sites I track on the subject, but what about you? My list of resources serves my blogging needs, so what do you blog about and what resources do you depend upon for your blog? Do you have a collection of sites you track, reference and use to do your blog research? A favorite dictionary, encyclopedia, statistics, or legal site you use to verify the little details in your blog?

How do you store them? In your browser bookmarks or favorites catch-all basket? On a bookmarking site? On your blog? Do you share your blog resources with your readers?

We all have our favorite sources for images and fact checking, so what are yours?