Curated list of personal blogs
refined.blog
refined.blog
First, there's Micro.blog (https://micro.blog/). They can host a blog for you, or you can publish to their service for free using your own blog by pointing Micro.blog at your RSS feed (I do the latter). Think blogging but with a social element, facilitating both interaction and content discovery.
Second, there's the IndieWeb movement more broadly (https://indieweb.org/), which advocates for a whole ecosystem of distributed, open technologies for enriching the blogging ecosystem and encouraging interoperability.
Third, believe it or not, webrings live on! The indiewebring (https://indieweb.org/indiewebring), for example, is a fun way to find additional bloggers out there.
As you can tell, I'm a fan of blogging and the IndieWeb movement... :)
Don't be the guy who strokes his chin and says "You say you're a vegan, yet you have a leather wallet. Interesting."
First, it's categorized. The platform uses emoji instead of hashtags and the Discover page has a set of defaults, so clicking on the dropdown at the top of the page will give you some other options. You could also try a keyword search to find posts related to topics you're interested in, and then see if you want to follow those people.
That being said, the second thing to know about the Discover page is that it's hand curated, and I'll be the first to admit that there's a pretty clear bias in the kinds of posts that bubble up. :) For example, I follow @adamcomputer (https://micro.blog/adamcomputer), because, as you can probably guess, I'm very much a nerd. But I don't know that I've ever seen any of his stuff land in the Discover feed. So instead, I sometimes find interesting people and look at who they're following and go from there.
Now, I still very much enjoy browsing the Discovery feeds! But I'll be the first to admit discoverability is, at least in my opinion, still a challenge on the service.
I can't help but notice all the blogs tagged "software" in the list (so far). In fact, I think if there was a filter to exclude software blogs, there might be only a few remaining?
I missed out on the whole RSS thing when it was popular. My sense was that it solved the problem of knowing when, among a whole bunch of blogs, a site had new content.
Perhaps it exists, I want an app/site that will scrape a list of sites I give it (blogs for example) to show me any new content each day. A personal home page with titles and perhaps a hundred or so words from each site I track that has new content.
In the broader picture, I feel overwhelmed by the amount of technology these days, spend too much of my time browsing, etc. (HN, case in point). So I am looking for something I call TRAoT, The Right Amount of Technology.
Maybe it's a "magic mirror" that displays this overview, home page. Interactivity is minimal or nil. No ability to comment, follow links, etc. Like the morning newspaper of old, I spend a little time in the morning with it and then go about my day "offline".
In short I am looking at ways to take the open-ended and stress inducing (anxiety inducing?) relationships I have with technology and replace them with a more staid, maybe even serendipitous, relationship that allows me back more free time, less stress.
Maybe this "Solar Punk" thing is something of the Zeitgeist of our time.
In general, most blogs and major news sources, along with aggregators like Reddit and Hacker News, publish RSS feeds. It's basically the way I consume content on the web.
If you want to give it a try I'd recommend Feedly.
I'm satisfied so far.
[Not affiliated with feedly, just a happy user]
And for an iOS/Mac client I _highly_ recommend “Reeder”. [0]
Have used both for years now.
I like the app as well and it can scrap websites that don't even provide RSS feeds, given that they are scrabbable of course.
On the one side, for many years that was what people considered their "home page": you'd use a "Portal" like Yahoo! or MSN.com and they'd support all sorts of customization, including blocks for RSS feeds you'd give it. It's hard to imagine today's super-curated and overly news-obsessed Yahoo! or MSN.com being truly customizable and allowing you to pick and choose RSS feeds over media conglomerate content, but Yahoo! has fallen quite far from its peak and MSN.com and others were always flirting with the media conglomerates over user interests.
The other thing that existed in the Ancient Times that even fewer remember today was that HP believed RSS feeds actually could herald the "personal morning newspaper era" and that it would be great for printer and ink sales so they had an RSS reader for years that you'd give it a list of RSS feeds and a print schedule and it would happily have your "morning newspaper" printed and waiting for you.
It was an interesting idea, though I still don't think the waste of paper/ink on that was necessarily the best idea for the planet, but there was some romance to the concept of a "personalized morning newspaper".
Most e-readers have an RSS app or three, some with strong offline support. You might be able to get what you want from the right app.
I've also seen some interesting DIY projects (mostly here on HN) of people taking big e-ink displays and building ambient personal news surfaces. Nothing productized yet, but very cool to see people DIY exploring the "magic mirror" spaces for non-interactive "here's a glance at stuff you care about" displays.
Sort the table by Tags.
There are 9 non-software blogs out of ~250 blogs. So, yes, about 96% software.
I felt exactly the way you did for a long time. Eventually, I decided to invest in setting up a more healthy and symmetric relationship with information, like you describe.
I realized RSS was the right tool for this goal. I'd definitely recommend trying this, even if you don't have the gall to self-host. It feels like I get three square meals a day, instead of injecting corn syrup every 15 minutes for 16 hours.
I chose to self-host my reader + data store, so that all of the data can live on my machine, and so I'm not dependent on some VC, advertising, or goodwill-backed project that will kick the can in a few years. There are plenty of good options. I decided to try out miniflux [1] as a first pass because I liked it's dependency graph, and haven't felt the need to try anything else.
Most blogging platforms (blogger, squarespace, wordpress, substack) produce RSS feeds by default. News aggregators like HN and Reddit have robust APIs for generating RSS feeds.
There are products like you describe, that convert a web page into an RSS feed with various hacks. IMO, this creates too big of a dependency on a flaky third-party. It might (literally!) be easier to build+maintain it yourself for the few sites that don't have an RSS feed, with `curl` `echo` and `sed`.
All writing is from a present understanding.
* The writer expresses poorly considered opinions, loosely holds them. They won't bother defending them.
* The writer expresses anodyne opinions that might one day become controversial, they won't bother holding onto them when the rest of society moves on from them.
In both cases, I wouldn't bother reading what they had to say. I could open the opinion section of any newspaper to get the same content with twice the conviction.
Nothing wrong with hedging your opinions in-text. But if you're hedging everything you say before you've even bothered to say it, you either have nothing interesting to say or probably censor yourself enough already.
The solution is simple. Treat all people as people. If you can't, don't talk about them.
Edit: Perhaps projecting my opinions I assumed you were talking about political correctness. However re-reading your post I am not so sure that's what you meant.
(Ah! I notice you've edited it. It's worth pointing out that 'Political Correctness' was originally a term to describe the 'correct' behaviour of people in totalitarian states.)
I write it first, then look for edge cases.
Perhaps I should add a new step, post after the edge cases have been considered.
Or use the "delay" feature on your HN profile page: e.g. mine is set to 2, meaning after I post a comment, I have 2 minutes to edit, reconsider, proofread or delete before anyone sees it.
Which also means taking into account that some people are, in fact, unfair assholes and that you may fail to recognize them in time.
I felt the same pressure as you, but so far it's been very rewarding: turns out I don't have to get famous to enjoy blogging, which was something I wanted to test when I started it. So far so good.
About offending people - think of it as an opportunity to learn. You put your opinions out there, and if someone points out a flaw in your thought process, you try to see where you went wrong. If you were wrong, you get to make another blog post explaining your new understanding, and thanking the person who helped you get there. If you weren't wrong... well, there are trolls on the internet everywhere, you just learn to ignore them.
Until you end up being the target of an internet mob bent on harassing you and everyone associated with you until someone breaks.
This is probably a lot rarer than headlines make it seem, but I share OP's anxiety about blogging about anything even tangentially related to politics.
I think his concern is it affecting job prospects, etc. Being recognized after one dies is not appealing to him :-)
(I often look at biographies, and being recognized only years after death is quite common).
The question that I don’t think we have an answer to (but we see some worrisome trends) is: does this hold up in an era where those odd beliefs aren’t just a footnote somewhere but instead tightly bound to ones identity for the rest of eternity?
Basically, how does social media and “cancel culture” change things, or does it?
When your blog is part of your in real life public presence, you obviously don't want to do that. And I started blogging before many of today's concerns became as big a deal. But, if I were starting a blog today that was divorced from my professional identity, I'd seriously consider not connecting it to real life me--especially if I regularly blogged about political issues (which I don't).
There's a long history of people writing under pseudonyms. If someone really cares they might be able to connect the dots (and many times so if they're a government) but that's not the attack scenario for most people.
Hopefully this doesn't become a bigger trend. As you said, the government can connect the dots if they need/want to. There's no need to vigilantes to do it on their behalf.
It's a shame, semi-permanent communication now represents an attack surface for randos hoping for their free-floating rage to find a surface upon which it might condense. In a sense, this provides little benefit to you except as an outlet and perhaps as a way to exercise writing skills, learning about a blogging platform, perhaps SEO (or not!), and so forth, but now the possible benefits are outweighed by the potential negatives.
The future looks like a lot of people performing the "grey rock" method. It's a pity, but that's the system as it punishes and rewards today.
Because that is now the white power sign. That's reality now.
My point is very simple, and it goes for blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or bumper stickers on your truck: there's a lot of people out there who looking for the barest thing to fixate upon to get you in trouble, right down to a simple knuckle-crack.
I'll be blunt: I think it's very unlikely that your opinions on <insert current controversial topic> are going to revolutionize the status of the debate on that topic. The world has nothing to gain by you writing about that topic, and as you say, there's a chance you have something to lose. So just don't write about that. My advice if you want to maintain a blog is to write about something you care about and know about.
You can view my personal blog if you like, it's in my profile. I write about woodworking and video games and gardening. No one has tried to destroy my life for my experiences with growing grapevines. Sure, if I went off on a rant about <insert controversial topic> or wrote a bunch of hyper-negative invective about <insert group of people>, yeah that might come back to bite me. So I don't.
No one's going to come after you for a personal blog about playing guitar or whatever. Stay positive. Stay constructive. Stick to what you know. Don't invite controversy. You'll be fine, and maybe you'll even create something that touches someone else in a positive way.
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
There. It happened. In the real world. So cracking your knuckles is there under "inviting controversy."
Part one: You, me, the writer (any human being)
Part two: Existing in a public space (to be found via Google or or noticed in Twitter or making stuff on Etsy or showing things on Instagram or just being photographed in person)
Part three: Self-expression of any form (writing something that will be found "colonial," or a blog, or making a hand gesture, cracking one's knuckles, or standing there with an uncomfortable smile, or even knitting (https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...) in that public space
Part four: Negative consequence for that self-expression ("cancelled," getting fired, the usual death threats, "screaming, hats first into the wood chipper") from ... people who have never even met you, who found that self-expression in the public space.
Cardinal Richelieu: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
It's the revolutionary spirit of the times. These incidents occur. You may not be aware of them, but others are aware of them, and they have what is known as a chilling effect.
Is the idea that the NBC San Diego branch just ... made this up? That the BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d70h) fabricated this wholesale? Let's just click through some of those hyperlinks in the Unherd thing. https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/07/2019-my-year-of-col... sure seems to have happened; take care to note "I've offended many people with this post, and for that I am deeply sorry. Please read my comment here. And 01.12 Please read my follow-up about what’s wrong with this post here."
These are all things that have occurred in "reality" and the "real world," to use your diction. You can now ignore them -- feel free! -- but pretending that they didn't happen is, I don't know, a performance only for yourself, because I cannot unsee what has been seen.
I am not terrified; as above, I pointed out that the potential negatives outweigh the possible benefits at this point. It's a simple analysis. You have elected not to factor those real world events into your analysis.
If your news diet is consumed by negative press and sad stories, they become more readily available[0] to you and can affect your decisions adversely by making you think that the base rate of such bad events are more common than they really are[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
> I am afraid to blog.
Don't be.
> I could write about my career and my hobby, but those do not seem to be interesting for others.
Says who? Let others be the judge.
> My opinion may be interesting, but it is risky because something I write may come back to offend others one day, or get me in trouble.
This one is tricky but its easy: be careful with humor as that tends to be a source of social faux pas. Steer clear from politics. Stay on topic.
example: I was reading a blog about Linux desktop critique which devolved into a stupid rant about RMS and woke politics. Hard fail on the authors part.
> One time ago I considered blogging anonymously about the economy but doing so anonymously felt disingenuous.
Many people throughout history have wrote many things under anonymous pen names. It's fine.
I feel old and curmudgeonly now. Thanks.
I think there is still quite a lot of value for solutions that you could devise because of experience.
For instance something you came up with where you had to piece together multiple SO answers for a particular use case.
For example, my blog has had thousands of hits on a page to set up Active directory login with rails even though that question is on SO because my use case was quite specific.
Or, things that you came up with because you have experience with reading the docs or the source code.
Or even where you were skilled enough to override part of existing library for a better solution.
And finally quirks that you discovered while using specific tools that might be documented but might have side effects that are a bit more arcane.
The more important thing that is happening isn't all the fuss about "cancel culture" or "free speech", it's that society is pushing towards the absolute division of the grey area between the public and the private, which is the area where politics actually take place. The real danger is that speech itself, in one mode entirely full of consequences and in another mode devoid of any, will become meaningless because of this distinction. What you say will no longer be related to what you actually do anymore, and speech will just be a floating signifier that no longer has any basis in reality and will lose the ability to change the world. The "freedom of speech" isn't the thing at stake, it's the value of speech itself that's being jeopardized.
Don't overthink. You see there are many one post sites out there. If you can manage it regularly do it.
I dislike medium but I also worry that if too many people are reinventing their blog platform, aren't we risking low quality non-scrapable content?
Is there a blogging platform that you just have to fill in the blanks and get RSS, accessible content with perhaps a very basic gui and code editor for posts?
I even fired up a hosted Wordpress site a few years ago but then never did much with it so I shut it down.
I've toyed around with WordPress, Jekyll, Hugo, etc etc and spent more time making shit work as I want it to than I did actually writing things. Ghost is amazing and I won't look for anything else for a long time.
That depends on who you follow. It's in your hands.
Software talk on instagram is pretty surface level and very picture oriented (look at my desk setup/terminal/editor/whatever).
[1] https://github.com/webuild-community/federated-blog [2] https://read.webuild.community
One can also limit the list with the ?key= queryparam, like so: https://collection.mataroa.blog/?key=philosophy
I've found that doing something daily is the best way for me to build habits. It's been a fantastic experience. My writing became more concise. It's given me clarity.
And great idea for the site- I submitted a pull request for my blog [0].
Side note: My other favorite types of websites are very specific human-curated lists... which also seem to have died out.
For myself, I've done a ton of writing[0], but my work seems to be too long-form for most. I don't really go out of my way to promote it. I basically have them up, so I can reference them in the odd comment.
Not the end of the world. I generally write for my own benefit; not for others.
[1] is exactly the kind of post that I include in my newsletter, but if it is not posted on HN, I can't see it
(there is a typo in the link you posted)
[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...
It's just that it is so crazy, with ego and money to be made. I really have neither interest, so I don't have the energy or the inclination to do much to promote.
I spend most of my time actively writing software, and my postings are occasional "breaks," where I spend a couple of days, writing about something. It gives me a chance to "regroup," and, sometimes, explaining stuff helps me to understand it, myself, better.
I agree that longform blogs are important and good, but it has been my experience that very few people are actually interested in them.
For example, I will sometimes write a comment (you may have noticed that my comments tend to be long), and a reply is made, highlighting one sentence; usually context-free, and adding some kind of "slap."
Often the "slap" is someone saying that I am not talking about the very thing that most of the comment was about. They didn't even bother to read the whole comment. What makes me think they would read one of my long-ass screeds?
These Romans are crazy.
For example, I have an old blog post that got featured in podcasts, on dailyjs, HN, is linked to from MDN, etc. When I wrote it in 2014 I pretty much just submitted it to Reddit, that's it. Nowadays I couldn't recreate that exposure -- or even a tiny fraction of it -- if my life depended on it.
It would really help if the owner of this site made a web form that didn't require you to have a Github account to submit things (or even understand how to hand-type the weird json format that they want)
I estimate that extra amount of user abrasion is preventing something like 99% of people from submitting their blogs.
Newsletter: https://bengtan.com/interesting-things
Sample issue: https://bengtan.com/newsletter/sample
[0] https://www.thinking-about-things.com/ [1] https://essays.findka.com/
Assuming the content is relatively novel or fresh and possibly niche (tech related) for example.
I hate spam, so I hesitate to submit anything here. Perhaps it’s the fear of critique that induces hesitation (for me personally).
Is there a general rule of thumb or guideline?
Perhaps it'd be a good idea to add a "last post on" or some other indicator of activity.
Having a filter for specific tags (e.g. 'add/remove this tag') would help the blog discovery process.