New Westminster’s thriving blogosphere includes a number of excellent blogs. Here are a few of the best. If you know a blog that should be on this list, please leave a comment and I’ll be happy to add it to the list!

Local news/issues

• May Queens and Movie Scenes – Langara College journalism student Alannah Hardinge-Rooney blogs about life and politics in the Royal City
• Voice New Westminster - New Westminster’s only political slate blogs about community issues.
• From The Editor’s Desk - The editor of The Royal City Record, Pat Tracy, shares her observations about journalism and other things that catch her attention.
• Only In New West - Record reporter Theresa McManus shares bits & pieces that don’t fit into print.
• In The Spotlight - The Record’s Arts reporter Julie McLellan blogs about local theatre, music and the arts.
• The Time-Out Corner - Notes from The Record’s education coverage. The blog was launched by Niki Hope (whose name still appears as the author), but it’s currently written by Alfie Lau while she is on maternity leave.
• One-Man Team - Record sports reporter Tom Berridge blogs about local sport.

Environment

• Green New West – Patrick Johnstone’s wicked smart take on environmental issues in New Westminster. Pat’s the president of the New Westminster Environmental Partners (NWEP), a non-partisan group promoting sustainability. He is a trained environmental geoscientist and works as an environmental coordinator.
• Car(e)free New West – A working mom and scientist blogs about family life ‘sans automobile.’
• Glenbrook North Zero Waste – Colborne St. neighbours challenged themselves to see how close they could get to zero waste, and blog about their progress.
• Down By The River – Photo-filled blog about local environment and sustainability.
• URBNgreen - Kathleen Somerville writes about education & environmental stewardship.

Personal blogs

• The Arbolog – Tenth to the Fraser regular Jen Arbo also writes a personal blog about family, green living and updates on her backyard chickens.
• The Cheeseblog – The funniest blog in New West. Clara writes about her kids, her community and whatever else is on her mind.
• St. Aardvark The Carpeted – Married to Ms. Cheeseblog, St. Aardvark writes a techie blog that is unreadable to mere mortals. If you understand sentences like, “For fun, I tried running the job with MPICH2, another MPI implementation and found pretty terrible performance. It turned out that it wasn’t running on all the nodes…in fact, it was only running on one node, and with as many processes as CPUs I’d specified. Since this was meant to be a 4-node, 8-CPU/node version, that meant 32 copies of Emacs on one node. Damn right it was slow,” then this blog is for you.
• A Moment 2 Think – A recent transplant to New Westminster from Calgary, Kathleen blogs about motherhood and parenting, politics, the environment, food and whatever else is on her mind. She hosts “ControverSunday,” a weekly blog carnival that challenges mommybloggers and others to weigh in on controversial issues.
• In New West With Kids - Linda M. Tobias shares her observations about family life in New West
• Me Gusta! – Leslie Robinson writes about eclectic topics that interest her
• Crunchy Carpets – A New Westminster mom of three writes about parenting and family life.
• Michelle’s Family Journal – Mom Michelle writes about life at home with her daughter.
• Acts of Minor Treason – Andrew Barton writes about transit, science fiction and other wonderfully nerdy things. He writes in his bio that he has been accused of being a “pencil neck geek.”
• Distinctly Dearheart – Brigette Mayer writes about life and creativity.
• Liquid Thoughts – Matthew Laird‘s blog includes everything from political opinions to recipes.
• Knit Better Socks – The prolific Reena Meijer Drees shares sock-knitting tips.
• My Year of Shopping Locally – Queensborough writer Sheila Keenan challenged herself to shop only within the limits of New Westminster for a whole year, and blogged her progress. Her experiment is now over, but there are lots of good local shopping tips in the archives.

Food

• Mary’s Test Kitchen – New to veganism and New Westminster, Mary blogs about gardening, food and our community.
• The Hungry Taurus – Melissa Balfour runs the New Veganminster Project, which aims to transform New Westminster into a vegan foodie mecca.
• Kids In The Kitchen – Kid-friendly recipes, shared by a local family that cooks together.
• Michelle’s Recipe Box – Healthy family-friendly recipes.
• My Little City Food Garden – Urban farmer Elise Weatherby shares her progress as she learns how to grow food in the city.

Politics beyond New West

• Gender Focus – Jarrah Hodge blogs about politics, pop culture, and current events from an anti-racist feminist perspective. Jarrah also writes for Bitch Magazine, The Vancouver Observer and About-Face.
• David Brett – David blogs about business, politics and religion