Tell HN: Five random IndieWeb blog links on your terminal

Hello HN! I believe some of you might have come across this pretty interesting post about discovering IndieWeb blogs, one blog at a time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43139953>

That post is actually a link to <https://indieblog.page/>, which features an impressive list of independently maintained personal websites and blogs with RSS feeds.

I was wondering, if instead of discovering one blog at a time, I could discover five blogs at once, directly from my terminal! Turns out the website has <https://indieblog.page/random> which picks a random blog and redirects you to it. It has daily feeds of N random posts too, where N = 1, 3, 5, and 10.

But if, like me, you'd like to have five random blogs suggested in your terminal, here is a quick shell one-liner I'd like to share. It fetches the random blog picker page five times, cleans up the URLs a bit, and prints them on the terminal:

  for _ in $(seq 1 5); do curl -sSI https://indieblog.page/random | grep location | sed 's/location: \(.*\).utm_source=.*/\1/'; done 

Or if you want something to go in ~/.zshrc, ~/.bashrc, etc., then you could have a tiny shell function like this:

  iw5() {
      for _ in $(seq 1 5)
      do
          curl -sSI https://indieblog.page/random |
              grep location |
              sed 's/location: \(.*\).utm_source=.*/\1/'
      done
  }

Here is an example output:

  $ iw5
  https://justinsimoni.com/colorado-trail-24-hour-backpacking-challenge-in-may-how-far-can-i-hike/
  http://www.iamcal.com/2024-09/10218/
  https://dracos.co.uk/wrote/advent-of-code-2024-7/
  https://leancrew.com/all-this/2024/12/mind-your-plotting/
  http://i.never.nu/personal-foundational-texts/

It helps me to quickly browse through a set of random suggestions on the terminal, decide which one I want to visit, right click on it, and select the "open link" option to open the link in a web browser. Yes, I know this amounts to judging a post by its link, but sometimes the post slug (if present) alone sparks enough curiosity to dive deeper, and it's a quick way to explore new posts without overthinking it.

If you're using this, please be considerate of the indieblog.page web server. Avoid running it too frequently to prevent putting unnecessary strain on the server.