alt Hacker NewsOoh.directory: a place to find good blogs that interest you
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Related. Others?
A collection of 2,299 blogs about every topic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40693787 - June 2024 (18 comments)
Remember to submit your blog to ooh.directory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36458877 - June 2023 (6 comments)
Ooh.directory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33719983 - Nov 2022 (167 comments)
The problem with https://ooh.directory/ is that nobody can tell what gets added and what doesn't. Submissions go through an opaque review process and a lot of good submissions don't make it.
Just try searching your favorite bloggers in ooh.directory. 9 out of 10 times they'll be missing from the directory.
I'd prefer a more transparent directory where we can can tell why something is or isn't added.
I am pretty happy with https://marginalia-search.com/. It's kind of my secondary search engine at this point. I can always search for anything and find indie websites writing about the topic.
It also helps with the dread of not having to add my personal site to yet another blog curation site which I don't know will:
1. Be maintained in the longer term.
2. Would be willing to add my site to the curation site.
I was looking at the RSS spec a while back to figure out how the category field was supposed to work and ended up digging up web directory history.
https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/
Syndic8, DMOZ, NewsIsFree, and TX (lost to history?) used the same taxonomy approach seen on ooh.directory. All are defunct now, but DMOZ appears to live on as curlie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories
Technically, we could tag our RSS feeds with the taxonomy defined by ooh.dir, which would allow us to automatically sort blogs into topic groups, but I haven't found a single feed that uses the approach. We end up with ad-hoc category labels that are challenging to deduplicate, or more often, uncategorized blogs.
I also maintain a human-curated directory (and search engine) of personal blogs at https://minifeed.net
You can submit a blog here: https://minifeed.net/suggest
Criteria is pretty simple:
- Must be written by a human.
- Must be in English (for now).
- Must have a valid RSS feed.
- Must not be purely a "micro-blog", i.e. must have some content other than tweet-sized status updates or links.
I am a fan of https://blogs.hn/. It is mostly HN-like content, but I visit it daily. I wish there was a "new" view though.
Just worked on adding categories to Kagi Small Web (inspired in part by OOH) last night.
This did give it a new dimension.
Each has its own RSS feed too as well.
From what I have seen over the years, the problem with such aggregation sites has been that the maintainer eventually loses interest or does not renew the domain etc.
The only way to maintain long term interest in such sites would be to have it as a github site/or a long term commitment, community contributions with some kind of community filtering/voting to maintain the quality of submissions.
A good idea, and one I had myself recently.
Some suggestions: I know none of us like "the algorithms choosing", but I think we can do better than alphabetical order. Number of clicks you see (popularity), or number of inbound links google tells you about would be good.
I also think you've gone to great effort, but it's still very light in some categories. I hope you keep going - what's your data source? Are you tracking outbound links from the ones you have indexed to find new blogs?
Does the name ooh has anything to do with Yahoo. Because that was what reminded me of, but I cant find anything about naming info on the site. So just wondering.
There are lot of internet article farming, but the real internet is increasingly "small". So I am not surprised we are back to where we started again; Directory.
the google is dying narrative usually misses the fact that the incentive loop for niche blogs is just broken right now. we're caught between writing for the 'helpful content' algorithm or writing for actual humans. curated directories like this are basically the only way to bypass the seo arms race and find real domain expertise again.
Turns out my blog is actually a newsletter? Seems like a distinction without a difference.
I have a page on my site dedicated to list the blogs I frequent:
I'm not sure about the orange on dark green colour scheme, but I like that the site is responsive and light-weight, and manages to show a bunch of fancy effects in pure CSS.
I was surprised that Simon Willison's blog is listed in Python and Web Development categories, but not AI.
Wow, I just worked on a blog sophistication analyzer. I wonder what could be learned by comparing all blogs here together: https://github.com/juleshenry/-shtetltleths-
Opened it, and two clicks in I immediately found a blog that made me say “woah”. Success!
> No blogs or categories were found matching emacs.
OK then.
I'm subscribed to the Index Issue (i think that's the name) which has a nice short list of curated blogposts. Works for me!
Granted, I'd love a more technical version. Perhaps anyone here could start one?
Make an RSS list, pick the ones out you liked and BAM, you got my sub :)
ooh this reminds me of the old internet. Altavista, Yahoo, etc. all had lists like this!
It's fun to click about and go down the rabbit hole of things I might not normally see in my daily routine which is now mostly about avoiding the hellscape of the modern internet.
the internet got just a little bit more human again.
This is great. Some good nostalgia vibes.
The fact that it’s not exhaustive and is a reflection of the creator’s taste is a feature, not a bug.
Nice nostalgia but are these directories actually being used by anyone?
https://minifeed.net is another similar site that I’ve enjoyed.
Have another look at this great project!
Please considered sorting websites by last updated date by default, instead of alphabetical which is a pretty useless method of presentation. It works better for books and static pages, not dynamic internet content.
Finding niche, personal blogs has become so difficult lately because search results are dominated by massive corporate sites and SEO-optimized junk. This is a great way to actually discover the 'small web' again. It reminds me why I started following RSS feeds in the first place.
Given how worried everyone is about the AI slopocalypse where the internet is drowned in LLM-generated junk content maybe it's time for a resurgence of human curated directories like this one.