I read a lot of engineering blogs and technical articles.
There are many good blogs from companies, developers, and open source projects. The problem is not finding content. The problem is having too much content.
Every day new articles are published. I follow many sources, but checking every website again and again is not practical.
So I started building BlogDrop.
What is BlogDrop?#
BlogDrop is a simple place where I can collect engineering blogs in one feed.
Instead of visiting many different websites, I can see new articles in one place.
BlogDrop also adds some useful information to the articles like summary, tags, categories, key takeaways, and reading time.
So before reading an article, I can quickly understand what it is about and decide if I want to read it.
Why I built it#
The main reason is actually very simple.
I was having this problem myself.
I was saving articles, opening bookmarks, checking blogs, and sometimes finding an interesting article but forgetting about it later.
I wanted something where I could just open one place and see what is new from the engineering blogs I care about.
I also wanted to learn while building it.
There are many things happening in BlogDrop behind the UI — RSS feeds, article extraction, background jobs, AI processing, database, filtering, and more.
So it is also a project where I can experiment with these things.
What BlogDrop does#
Right now BlogDrop mainly does a few things.
- Collects articles from engineering blogs
- Stores and organizes them
- Generates useful metadata using AI
- Adds tags and categories
- Shows a short summary
- Shows key takeaways
- Helps find articles based on topics
The idea is not to read everything for you.
It is just to make finding what to read easier.
What BlogDrop does not do#
I don't want BlogDrop to become another AI content website.
It doesn't create random articles just to fill the feed.
It doesn't try to replace the original writer.
The original article is still the important thing. BlogDrop is only helping you discover it and understand what it is about.
Also, AI summaries can be wrong sometimes. So I don't want people to blindly trust them instead of reading the original article.
Why not just use RSS?#
RSS is actually great.
But when you follow many sources, the list can become difficult to manage.
BlogDrop is not trying to replace RSS. I am using RSS as one of the ways to collect the articles and then adding another layer on top of it for discovery and organization.
What I want to build next#
I don't have a huge roadmap for BlogDrop.
I want to first make the basic experience good.
Finding a useful article should be fast.
The feed should not feel like another place where you have to scroll forever.
Later I want to make recommendations more personal, so BlogDrop can understand the topics I usually read and help me find related engineering content.
But for now, I am keeping it simple.
I built BlogDrop because I had a small problem:
There are too many good things to read and not enough time to find the right one.
Let's see where this experiment goes.