A Directory of Personal Blogs | Hacker News Reader

A Directory of Personal Blogs

blogsurf.io

130 pointsdbrereton30 comments

I hope we are going to see an old web resurgence in the coming years and personal blogs will once again populate the hn frontage. If we can't keep the old web, nobody can. We are a niche, a tech niche, but we have to stop visiting medium or other centralized services.

Crop tops are everywhere when nobody expected then 30 years later after all.

Yeah I think there is a rise in personal blogs/websites and we'll be seeing more of it. It's just hard to discover right now.

Neocities has been doing a great job at making it easy to keep the spirit of the old web alive. They allow anyone to make whatever kind of site they want, plus make it easy to discover active sites. Try out their search functionality. They give screenshots of every page so you can find the more visually interesting or content-filled ones right away

what do you see on the frontpage? It's more than half random domains and posts by random people about a myriad of topics, news from individual sites (not corporate news centers), and github pages of tools which might as well be 'personal' sites.... and many of the new submissions to the site that get upvoted daily are like articles on this and that publishing sites, which are the same thing just more uniformly designed/less 'personal' looking. Still personal content.

I agree and hope this trend continues. I think the more lightweight, self-hosted, decentralized sources of information we have, (blogs/etc) the better. I miss the old days of example.com/~user

I am also happy to see less Medium and way way less Facebook. I believe that not everything on the internet has to exist to generate revenue. I appreciated the "old web" where users put up information because they wanted to, not because their first goal was money.

Definitely agree. I've got a lot more value from these kind of sites recently and I enjoy going through them more.

I almost exclusively hunt for personal blogs on the new page nowadays. I really enjoy seeing what people write and what approaches they take to designing their blogs.

Well in that case if you have time, you can check mine https://bobbydreamer.com/how-i-made-this-site

Sorry, this thread got lost in my feed. Thanks for linking, it looks great! Subscribed via RSS.

Nice job getting something built and launched. That in and of itself is a huge accomplishment, so congrats to you!

I know everyone has opinions and feature requests but to me the thing that I would find the most useful is a feed of the blogs' content under the tags themselves (e.g. all the posts in #ruby maybe sorted by popularity if you wrap those links and track clicks or something). Either via RSS or use your email signup form to capture me and send me digests of updates. I know you'd have to go workout deals with all those bloggers (or have a TOS giving you permission) for their content and what not, but you emailing me every time you add a new blog isn't high value and I don't want a job checking all those blogs or finding an RSS reader and subscribing to them and keeping the list up to date and curated.

That's my $.02 so take it for what it's worth. I don't know your plans for this but that was the first thing that struck me as being the most obvious product feature to add value.

Best of luck to you!

Thanks for the feedback, it's always helpful to hear people's thoughts!

I agree that blog content would be useful. Planning to add it in as well, but haven't decided exactly how it's going to look yet.

Nice! I hope we can eventually filter by multiple tags.

EDIT: I think the idea of the Data Shop[1] is pretty brilliant. I might make something like that.

[1]: https://blogsurf.io/data

> Nice! I hope we can eventually filter by multiple tags.

Definitely coming, along with better search/navigation in general.

I use to have a blog. But blogs back then were different. Mine was about short amusing dialogs. I wonder if people would still be interested in reading that kind of stuff now a days. By looking at your directory, they all seem to be about tech, right?

I think those types of blogs are cool too, and people still read them, but most of that type of content has probably migrated to social media.

The directory right now is focused on tech but the plan is to eventually cover all categories, including personal stories, and other random things.

Nice site. Scramble

I like this and submitted my own personal blog. Out of curiosity, are the blogs curated in any way to prevent the site from being overrun by blogspam?

Some feedback, I think adding pagination to the "all" page would be nice, maybe even an alphabetic index.

Awesome thanks for adding it! The blogs are all reviewed before being added so that should prevent spam from ever being an issue.

Definitely need to add pagination there, thanks for the feedback.

This is great, but it makes me so nostalgic for the old web.

If you want to feel even more nostalgic you should check out Wiby [0] and href.cool [1].

[0] https://wiby.me/

[1] https://href.cool/

Other collections:

The big list of personal websites: http://biglist.terraaeon.com/

The directory for Search My Site: https://searchmysite.net/search/browse/

10kb Club: https://10kbclub.com

The Mervielles webring: https://webring.xxiivv.com/

Is it just me, or does clicking on one of the links under "Random blogs" send me to a completely different url?

Not just you, realized there's some weird bug here, will look into it thanks!

You can submit an RSS link. Does it support Atom? My blog has Atom because I think that was the default with Zola

https://www.getzola.org/documentation/templates/feeds/

Yeah it supports Atom as well!

grew up in the old web but feel like we moved away from it for more than a few reasons......it's not just because of restrictive environment changes like death of Reader or some crap....

Anyone who's blogging regularly posts their new posts on their twitter account. So you follow the people you enjoy and then get their feeds that way. It's very personal.

Also, generally we moved away from this Yahoo site directory stuff because the net got too big!If the lack of ability to find the communities is your problem, there are plenty of 'starting off points' like dev.to, even mass blogging centers like medium.... I will always defer to twitter tho as the circles of people posting etc will coalesce in no time at all if you pay attention and add to your follows regularly

And then thru those follows, and maybe this is the real direction it needs to go more -- you will find people who curate -- share other interesting content regularly etc. There used to be more sites that focused on daily links curated by ppl who kept up on things. But that of course brings us back to HN. Isn't that what most of this is here? Our collective submitting and upvoting surfaces up the best content daily!

ah, and yes I just read your more in-depth About page which details some of the same history and trends I'm talking about. So good luck then!

Randomly came across a random site of someone who has been blogging for over 20 years [1]. I recently just started mine after procrastinating for 2 years. It's pretty exciting and humbling to see such great and dedicated folks on the web. Wonderful project dbrereton, thank you for sharing.

[1] https://adactio.com/journal?start=2760

Love the RSS buttons!

Does "all" have an rss feed?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com