That’s right, I’ve found it. The holy grail, the one feed to rule them all, the aggregator for your whole Internet. None of these walled-garden rent-seeking websites want you to have it, but I’ll share it with you.

It’s your bookmarks.

I have a long and often-changing list of websites I want or need to check:

Facebook, mainly for my local climbers’ group.

You Need A Budget to track my spending.

Threads. I miss Twitter’s golden age. Since I quit Twitter, I hoped Mastodon would become something. It didn’t, but I keep hoping Threads will become something.

Bluesky. Since Threads is a bust, I keep hoping this will become something.

Feedbin for the blogs I follow via RSS. This is the actual answer to, “What do I do without Twitter?”

Instagram. Technically it’s the worst photo site, but all the photographers are still here?

Glass, a technically good photo site with hardly any photographers.

Discord. I hate it, but I use it for talking about distributed systems with non-MongoDB colleagues.

My Google Docs spreadsheet of friends. A nerd’s way to maintain social ties. For each friend, I track how recently we’ve interacted, and a target frequency. Overdue friends turn red.

Lobste.rs. Hacker News without the preening fools, yet.

I put bookmarks to all these sites in a folder called “check” in Chrome’s bookmarks bar. Here’s how it looks in the bookmarks manager:

When I want to spend ten or twenty minutes just goofing around on the Internet, I right-click the “check” folder and select “Open All”, and the pages open in tabs:

This isn’t just a convenient way to goof off, it’s a behavior-modification tool for my future self. When I decided a couple years ago to get back into RSS, I added Feedbin to the folder. When I decided to give up on Mastodon, I removed it from the folder so I wouldn’t keep trying to make Mastodon happen. That bookmark is gone now, and so is my frustration.

When I instituted my friends spreadsheet, I added it to the folder. When some colleagues started using Discord, I added Discord to the folder. Now my slightly addictive websites like Instagram are paired with my regular chores, like You Need A Budget. I influence my future attention by curating the bookmarks in my “check” folder.

If there’s a site I want to check frequently, e.g. to see if a conference has posted next year’s dates, or whether anyone has replied to my question on an obscure forum, I add it to the folder. It doesn’t matter if the site has no way to subscribe by RSS or email. And I don’t need to use an unreliable third-party website change tracker like VisualPing, which has trouble determining if the site really changed in a way that matters to me. I just toss the site in my “check” folder, so I’ll automatically open it the next time I want to goof off. I keep checking the site until I see the change I’m hoping for, or give up. Either way, I just delete the bookmark from the folder.