NotesYou are viewing a humanly curated list of 681 fine personal & independent blogs and sites that are updated regularly. No algorithms ever!FeedUnfurl
NotesThis setup takes a bit of initial work, but the payoff is enormous. Once itās all set up, this workflow fades into the background - I just write, commit, and publish. No friction, no fees, and everything stays in my hands. If youāre looking for a lightweight, sustainable way to blog, this might be worth trying.Unfurl
NotesIf you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web.FeedUnfurl
NotesUndoubtedly, the sloppification of the internet will likely get worse over the next few years. And as such, the returns to curating quality sources of content will only increase. My advice? Use an RSS feed reader, read Twitter lists instead of feeds, and find spaces where real discussion still happens (e.g. LessWrong and Lobsters still both seem slop-free).Unfurl
NotesFor this solution, I'm using Pipedream. I've blogged for years now and love it. Their free tier will support what I'm showing below so you should feel free to give it a try. There are many alternatives out there, but Pipedream has some great features that I think make it stand out. You'll see that especially in the first step below. But, keep in mind if you've already got a platform you would want to use, as long as you can handle the execution on new RSS items, you could probably just skip to the last step and copy and paste from my code.FeedUnfurl
NotesBased on the work already done by Emily Liu and Samuel Newman, a straightforward (re)implementation of their commenting systems for static sites (tomcreighton.com is compiled offline and hosted on Github Pages, for example) using plain olā HTML and JS. Unfurl
NotesIn my last post, I spoke about the differences between the POSSE and PESOS blogging styles and why itās important. Today, Iām going to show you how I actually implement this with my website.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesThe Twitter meltdown made me realize something important: Iām a seriously prolific content creator. And Iāve been giving away all that content free to a platform that not only profits from it but treats me like garbage unfairly when it comes to sharing said profits. Meaning, they donāt share a dime. When I downloaded my Twitter archive, it hit me like a ton of bricks that most of that content was not sitting in my website, so they could just disappear if a billionaire decides to cut me off from the platform. FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notesmy personal website runs on a bespoke dynamic site generator i coded from scratch. but why? what lead me to designing and programming it? what can you do with it? and how can it be transformed into a tool for everyone to use? a deep dive into Deer Text Format, why it exists, and what lies in its future.Unfurl
NotesI love linking out to other sites. The strength of the open web is in its many connections between nodesā¦the more, the better. Links are the whole goddamned point of the web! I want to send people away from kottke.org to learn something new or have a chuckle and then come back the next day for more. The goal is connection, knowledge, and sharing ā I proudly have no competitors in this endeavor, only collaborators. (This is just another sentence so that I can link to more folks who love to link.)FeedUnfurl
NotesIāve been asked a couple times recently about the technology I use to publish this blog. I should have a colophon to link from the footer, right? So here it is as of October 2024.FeedUnfurl
NotesBlogging is the slow game, done sporadically over decades. Tags and categories help organize your work within itself, but hashtags let you develop a subject alongside the rest of your community.FeedUnfurl
NotesOn the internet, there is a clear social understanding of hashtags. If we create web rings for hashtags, we can use that to connect arbitrary web pages that add those hashtags to their content. This will allow us to create hashtag aggregation pages (like those on Twitter or Mastodon) that cross platform boundaries. The web ring will act as a community library that people can contribute to, filing their posts and articles and resources where they feel they fit.FeedUnfurl
NotesMany users prefer to use an RSS feed reader to stay up to date with the content on the websites they visit. But if you've enabled Cloudflare on your website, you're likely blocking these RSS users from accessing your website content without realizing it.FeedUnfurl
NotesOver the years, my blog has become a surprisingly complex application. Itās over 100,000 lines of code, not counting the content. Migrating everything over was a big project, but super educational. Iāll share my honest thoughts on all of the new technology I used for this blog.FeedUnfurl
NotesAs blogging pioneer Dave Winerās site turns 30, itās a reminder that good writing and thinking has flourished beyond the reach of social mediaUnfurl
NotesToday's the big day. Thanks to John Naughton's wonderful piece in the Guardian, I'm hearing from people all over the world about what blogging means to them. I appreciate all of the messages, but would appreciate them even more if they were on your blog. We need to keep using the tech. Blogging is kind of lost, and I would like to see that change. Every time you post something you're proud of on a social media site, how about taking a moment and posting it to your blog too. And while there, if appropriate, link to something from some part of your post, even though the social media sites don't support linking, the web is still there and it still does. #FeedUnfurl
NotesHey everyone! Today I wanted to talk about the state of the internet, how artists and everyone is affected by AI slop and social media, and why I think everyone should have a personal website these days! Let's bring back the old school internet in new, fun, and creative ways! ^_^EmbedUnfurl
NotesThis is a tool for generating a webring from RSS feeds, so you can link to other blogs you like on your own blog. It's designed to be fairly simple and integrate with any static site generator.Unfurl
NotesHighlight:Itās just that feeds could be so much more with some love and directed care ā something that could jump from a niche use case to a widespread ānormalā part of the Web for many.
Web feeds could be so much more if we put some effort into them. This post explores some ideas of how to start.FeedUnfurl
NotesRelay List is a site that indexes and tracks various ActivityPub relays that have been shared with the public or with the creator. Each relay is checked every 30 minutes, updating the number of participating servers, the registration status, and if the relay is online. This information is useful for server administrators when considering adding a relay to their instance.Unfurl
NotesWordPress Playground public API allows you to run and control an entire WordPress stack in your browser. You can use it to build an entirely new kind of a web app, like an in-browser WordPress IDE we built at CloudFest Hackaton 2023. In this post, you will learn how to get started. Unfurl
NotesWhat we need is a digital-media version of organic food or a local farmersā market: ethically sourced, sustainably funded, and integrity-certified, all the way from CMS up. Unfurl
NotesOnce up on a time, before my writing brain had been *entirely* swallowed up by Twitter. One of the most productive daily public writing tools I used was the OPML Editor and a daily outline always open on my desktop ready to receive thoughts. Kind of like Twitter, I guess, except it was a *thing* that I added to over the course of the day. I could edit it, publish it whenever, not publish it until I had my words straight.
This is one of the best short things I wrote with it - meditations on my Dad after his passing.Unfurl
NotesIt might appear like gloom and doom (actually, if it doesn't, you're not looking), but really it's a massive opportunity. Again, anyone who uses a news reader can't imagine having to live without one, yet I see the feed ecosystem slowly deteriorating with no replacement in sight. That's the opportunity, in my mind. It's not about simply mimicking Google Reader (which I would never do anyways, as I've never liked it), but about bootstrapping off the system we have today, in order to create a new type of news reader for tomorrow. The future of news readers, so to speak. ;-)FeedUnfurl
NotesIāve long privately thought that Firefox should treat feed reading as a first-class citizen of the open web, and integrate feed subscribing and reading more deeply into the browser (rather than the lame, useless live bookmarks.) The impending demise of Reader has finally forced me to spit out my thoughts on the issue. Theyāre less polished than I like when I blog these days, but here you go ā may they inspire someone to resuscitate this important part of the open web.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesInteresting historical perspective on RSS & feed readers & usenet, and a kind of depressing prediction that we're going back to the days of magazine silos.Unfurl
NotesThe tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we've lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.Unfurl
NotesBrewBlogger 2.3.2 is a easy to set up, easy to use, browser-based homebrew logging and calculation suite. It is a PHP/MySQL-based system that provides today's brewer not only a fast and easy way to record their brewing activities, recipes, and awards, but also forum to share their zymurgistic efforts and expertise with the homebrewing community around the world.Unfurl
NotesWhat does the future hold?
It is a good question. I have actually been thinking a lot about that lately and wondering how to reinvent the art form that I embraced over a decade ago. I donāt really have an answer, except that it is somewhere in the past and in the reasons why I fell in love with blogging.Unfurl
NotesI'll start with my disclaimer up front: These are my opinions you're about to read, not necessarily those of ReadWriteWeb. Now, maybe you've noticed this yourself already, but I actually don't read much "tech news" on the Web on a regular basis, besides what we publish here and what some friend...Unfurl
Ye Olde Blogroll - Because blogs are the soul of the web
How I write my blogs in Obsidian and publish instantly | Gautham Shankar
This page is under construction - localghost
AI Slop, Suspicion, and Writing Back | Ben Congdon
Automatically Posting to Bluesky on New RSS Items
Don't call it a Substack. - Anil Dash
Named Blogs - Jim Nielsenās Blog
How I am blogging the IndieWeb way ā Elizabeth Tai
POSSE and PESOS: Better ways to publish content ā Elizabeth Tai
TECH: Deer Text Format - the system powering this site, and how it can work for you - the DeerZone
Hyperlinks, the Open Web, and a Membership Appeal
Colophon (Interconnected)
An Experiment in Social Media
Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users - Open RSS
How I Built My Blog ā¢ Josh W. Comeau
The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted | John Naughton | The Guardian
Scripting News: Monday, October 7, 2024
~sircmpwn/openring - A webring for static site generators - sourcehut git
What RSS Needs
Relay List - Connecting the Fediverse
Provide Blog Metadata via JSON-LD - kiko.io
The best of the indie web | ~mathowie
The vanishing personal site ā Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report
A few thoughts about RSS news readers from someone who thinks about them way more than you probably do - Russell Beattie
Why feed reading is an open web problem, and what browsers could do about it ā Luis Villa
WordPress āŗ Support Ā» Share a Draft
BrewBlogger Version 2.3.2 - The Browser-Based Homebrew Logging Solution
Pandora Relaunches Site in HTML5, Removes Music Listening Cap
