BlogScroll – An open directory of personal sites and blogs
blogscroll.com
blogscroll.com
Does the creator not know what a digital garden is?
[1] https://archive.org/details/gardens-and-streams-wikis-blogs-...
I intentionally try to avoid sites that are in any shape _not_ personal or otherwise representative of an individual trying to stake their little corner of the internet.
> If you are putting an effort to curate and grow your own site, is that not a digital garden?
That's really stretching the definition IMO.
What characterizes a garden is the slow growth and constant pruning — the making of a personal wiki. https://indieweb.org/digital_garden and https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history are good intros to gardens.
Most of the websites I visited seemed to be and forget sites targeted at potential employers.
> has content of different levels of development, is imperfect and often a playground for experimentation, learning, revising, iteration, and growth for diverse content
So because I polish my "posts" to a certain degree before publishing it's not a digital garden? Because 50% of my blog posts are "timeless" in a sense that they're about... stuff that exists.. not current dvelopments it's not a digital garden? Becuase I never delete stuff (as if people with wikis would delete stuff :P)... and so on.
I mean, I couldn't care less but I feel (and this seems to be a common theme) that the indieweb people are mostly dogmatic about their definitions and not very encouraging (also why I tried to take part in the irc channel years ago and left, frustrated).
But yeah, if someone want to own the definition of blog and digital garden and not accepting a certain overlap with "personal website", sure.
I'm not too fond of the term either, but I think that's because it got gentrified and somewhat misunderstood. Everything personal on the web was suddenly a garden.
> But yeah, if someone want to own the definition of blog and digital garden and not accepting a certain overlap with "personal website", sure.
Of course there's a overlap. My point was not that the listed sites had to fulfill the criteria for classification, but if there's not a single hint of gardening going on, then we might as well call en.wikipedia.org a blog?
Also, is a website "personal" if it's just there to market your services? Sure, it's personal as in your website, but content wise it's not particularly personal. Gardens or personal wikis are usually not there to market services, but to build some kind of personal knowledge base (that other nerds, not employers, might find interesting).
If you keep calling your dog a "cat" it won't start meowing.
The list is really disappointing, not only it's hard to find an actual digital garden on the list, most aren't even blogs, but simple resumes or portfolios.
How about a digital garden post about digital gardens:?
A-lot more of these exist but i don't know about them yet or i forget about them after sometime of not visiting them.
For viewing, I think you are doing well - your own domain name, which you can host where you like, and which currently doesn't impose many restrictions on who can view without signing up to anything.
But part of your community engagement is about having the community submit changes to you. And having that via GitHub is a walled garden - you can't make a PR without a GitHub account - or even search the code. And they say you are only allowed one free account - so one identity only - and I've heard credible reports they actively enforce it by IP matching etc..., and ban people if they suspect them of having two accounts.
Moving off GitHub isn't always that easy - you'd need to retrieve all your PRs, but then the problem is people who have GitHub accounts to engage with you would need to migrate their method of engagement.
So GitHub is absolutely a walled garden, and if you have a public GitHub, it is part of how you engage with your community.
Walled gardens do have the benefit of more people being in them - there is some barrier to entry to signing up on a random Gitea or Forgejo instance - but then you are beholden to the policies of the walled garden.
Included: gardens, personal websites, zines, and toys.
If you have a site to add, please open a GitHub issue: https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/new?assignee...
If your site is self-hosted (that is, not on medium.com or Substack or the likes, or if it is - has a custom domain), I'd be happy to add it. My goal for this year is to massively grow the list.
You are in full control down to the OS but not the hardware so yeah it counts.
I once questioned if hosting on VPS was covered under the term self-hosting and got down voted. It was a legit question, as is your question, but I guess people took it as if I was saying that it isn't self-hosting.
You might be interested in some of the ideas here: https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess/blob/main/manifesto-is...
Happy to have a chat if you think it makes sense. I dropped the project above a year ago.
Opened an issue to track and implement. Thank you for the suggestion!
Funny enough mining those links is what made Google the giant it is now. But this time around we will not be fooled by the next "don't be evil" tech giant :D
The idea was to be a content aggregator for what I called "siloed content" (personal websites, blogs, etc). The ideas are outlined here if anyone's keen:
https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess/blob/main/manifesto-is...
I'm happy for someone to take this over too even if they're interested. It's MIT-licensed.
That said, I’m loving this renewed interest in building our own little corners on the internet. I have mine[1] too.
[1]: https://rednafi.com
I also curate a list of blogs as part of my blog discovery/search engine/reader project: https://minifeed.net/blogs
For OPML, tracking the enhancement here: https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/198
The related posts are generated with the help of a vector database (Cloudflare Vectorize [1]). I take post titles and descriptions as input, vectorize and store the results in the vector DB. Then for each post, I find 10-15 related posts and store the results in a separate table (it's a plain one-to-many SQL table). This is done because querying the vector DB is not super fast, and I wanted Minifeed to load under 500ms (according to my status page tracking, users in Europe for some reason experience the fastest loading times of 100-200ms! [2]). I also set up a scheduled job which regularly updates the relations (since there are new posts every day, and some of them may become "related" to existing posts).
I've been meaning to write a blog post about the overall architecture of Minifeed, there are lots of small components related to RSS parsing, updates, caching, etc.
1. https://developers.cloudflare.com/vectorize/ 2. https://status.minifeed.net/
Surprised to see my blog[1] there :)
https://www.andreinc.net/links/
And maintain an active blogroll with blogs I follow:
The title properly refers to the fact that these sites aren't hosted on substack / medium / some other pre build environment.
Even pure signal can be overwhelming these days when so much good stuff exists.
Which brings us to the (as far as I know unsolved) question of supporting large scale discovery of the web without drifting into enshittification.
Some sort of decentralized index that will be distributed in a torrent-like manner might work but that requires curation too: Who and with what criteria can add an entry etc.
Bottom line is that the walled gardens did not exist, they evolved because the original web was missing critical components of usability. They exploited a vacuum.
To fill the vacuum with something more benevolent we need to go back and solve these problems. The rest will be history.
IMHO that's the beauty of it. Sometimes I want to be hit with everything the web has to offer.
But some other times I do want curated lists of links organized by category with opinionated criteria for inclusion.
That being said, the meta-point about at-scale discovery is astute - it's largely unsolved for personal sites/digital gardens. And I certainly don't want to be the bottleneck long-term. Will have to think through a solution as more content gets added.
https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-acquires-g...
My definition of property is more restricted : either having hosting somewhere as independent as possible or self-hosting on Raspberry Pi e.g.
My two cents
The site is deployed using a GitHub Actions workflow, which happens to be the only GitHub-specific feature, but a similar script could easily be written in the future for another hosting if necessary.
It never got traction so I dropped it but someone might be interested in the ideas behind it: https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess
What they are doing is literaly digital jails "for you own security........"