Reading blogs is something I believe every developer should do often. Not only is it a good way to broaden ones horizon and get up to date with all the great things happening round the world, you can also get in touch with the author and have a discussion about the subject in the comments.

Define the problem

The only problem I personally have with reading blogs is that it is really hard to focus on the content. While I am on the computer there are many distracting things going on. Twitter is buzzing, my nick is getting mentioned on IRC, a new email pops up etc. It is easy for me to ignore all those distractions when I am doing some real work, but reading a blog is not something I consider real work. The notifications are not the only problem. I find it really difficult to focus on a large wall of text on an LCD screen. My eyes start to hurt before I even start reading and the possibility, that I will stop, increases exponentially after each paragraph.

I have the same problems, give me a solution!

I solved all of the problems mentioned above by reading the longer blog posts on my Kindle. Now I primarily bought a Kindle for reading books. Where I am from, most books are rather expensive and the translations can sometimes be bad, especially with technical books on programming and the like. A kindle allows me to buy books easily and have them delivered to me in a matter of seconds.

Now to get back on reading blogs. Do I even have to point out that reading a longer blog post on an e-ink display is way more enjoyable than on an LCD screen? I also save a lot of time by sending blog posts to my Kindle during the day and then read a batch of them before I go to sleep. I can also get a good safety distance from all the distracting notifications of my laptop and read the blogs in peace, the way they were meant to be read.

How do you get the blogs on your e-reader?

There are many ways of getting a blog on your kindle. You can use the experimental browser to navigate to the blog site for instance, but I would not recommend that, as it can be a bit cumbersome. I found the solution that suits me best is a simple Chromium extension that sends the article (and just the article) to my kindle using my @free.kindle.com email address. For this I use an extension called Kindle It and I’ve been really happy with it, as unlike many others I’ve tried, it just works.

What are your thoughts on the subject? How did you read this blog post?