Whilst I am on blogging “sick leave”, I have invited anyone who fancies it to write a guest blog post. If you’re interested in contributing a self-build, green or cat-related post, please email me! Meantime, many thanks to Alex Johnson for this contribution.

Shedworkers are green workers and this is reflected in the interest on the Shedworking site whenever we feature a green issue, technique or supplier. Consequently, we keep a keen eye on the best of the environmentally-oriented bloggers who focus on architectural issues, of which our favourite five (actually six if you count carefully with some others suggested but that’s not such a snappy title) are:

1) Lloyd Alter at Treehugger
Lloyd is not only a decent chap, he is arguably the most influential blogger on green architecture (and we’re proud to have brought his cracking outhouse to the world via Shedworking). He is readable, intelligent, has a fine sense of humour and isn’t afraid to be controversial when needed.

2) Jetson Green
Run by Preston Koerner who calls it a ‘web magazine’, it covers anything to do with “green building, sustainable architecture, good design, clean technology in the built environment, and eco-friendly development”. It covers mainly American builds and issues but does reach out elsewhere sometimes. Preston is also on Twitter.

3) The Green Workplace
Run by Leigh Stringer who works global architectural firm HOK, it calls itself “the leading blog for those who design, manage or occupy green workplaces” which is quite true. Wideranging and well researched, this is another place I go to on a daily basis.

4) Mary’s Greened House Adventure
Though slightly in abeyance at the moment, this is an excellent blog which follows Mary’s construction of a green garden office from pre-drawing board to actually chopping up the straw bales for the walls herself. A personal but also useful blog, Mary is an international environmental consultant

5) Tiny House Blog and Tiny House Design
Not specifically green but all about the delights of living small rather than wasting big

I’d also recommend regular visits to Inhabitat (especially their Prefab Friday posts) and materialicious (again, not obsessively green but with a green sensibility).

- Alex Johnson

Alex says:

Navigation is straightforward – click on a page to bring it into focus, click to the side of a page to move pages, or on the corner.

It’s a great issue too with writer Clare Dudman featuring in the My Shed slot, Sarah Salway continuing her shed serial, Felix Bennett’s marvellous View From A Shed and a new slot featuring readers’ shed stories. You can read it online, download it as a pdf, and email a friend directly from the site to tell them all about it. Happy reading!

Do pop along and give it a spin!

The quality of the writing is great, but I’d like to see a lot more of it! The blog hasn’t been updated since March, and it’d be great if we could get at least one blog post each week. I’d also like Tim and Andy to remember that not everyone reading their blog is an expert in timber framing – they need to explain their jargon as they use it, so that us novices can learn something as we go along. Unfortunately, their RSS feed provides only headlines, and the archive navigation is so difficult that I gave up trying to dig into their old posts via the website and just read the ones still in the RSS feed. With my social media consultant hat on, I’d suggest getting Wordpress installed and using that for all things bloggish.

There are so many links here that it’s going to be a long time before I’ve looked through them all. How Timothy Latz, who runs the site, finds the time, I do not know!

I suspect the archives of these blogs will prove to contain some rich pickings in terms of information and ideas, so I will have to find the time to go through them at some point. But I still want to find more self-builders who are actively blogging.

One person to add to my RSS reader is Robert Bagnall, who writes 127a Church Street: Diary of a self-build. His blog started in April 2007, and it’s clear from reading the archives that the build is progressing apace. The house is up, the windows in, (even if some are wrong!), and he’s currently battling with awol electricians and plumbers who aren’t returning his call, so fingers cross the carpenter turns out to be more reliable!

Despite the fact that it seems he’s had a bit of a hard time herding all the relevant cats, Robert seems to have kept a sense of humour, and his blog is very readable. It also gives a real sense for the nitty gritty that every build has to deal with, from what it’s like dealing with local contractors and suppliers, to how much plumbers and their apprentices cost. (Plumber: £220 per day; plumber’s apprentice, an additional £40. Poor apprentice!).

Well worth a read!

Alex is clearly mining a very rich seam, as almost every post makes me go “Oooh!” There’s tons there that I want to spend more time investigating. I think you can expect a lot of inspiration “via Shedworking” here over the next few weeks! The blog is very busy too, with three to five posts a day – way more than I have time to write.

Alex also has a book, Shedworking – The Alternative Workplace Revolution, slated to come out in July and published by The Friday Project, although it’s unclear what effect their recent bankruptcy is going to have on whether the book comes out. I hope it does, because if the quality of the blog is anything to go by, the book would be a fab addition to my library. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

UPDATE 13/4/08: Alex reports that Harper Collins have taken over The Friday Project, but have declined to publish the book. That’s a shame, but hopefully Alex can find another publisher soon.