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Ooh.directory
- LoganDark 4y agoInstinctively typed "furry" into the search bar and got no results. High quality!
- foofoo4u 4y agoTerrific. Brings back early internet vibes. I want to see more of this — human curated content. AI brought the promise of bringing improved content suggestions. I find it has done exactly the opposite. End of the day, I find humans are better at curating content for humans than machines.
- cgranier 4y agoI still have an instance of Fever running on one of my servers.... but I really need to update the feeds I'm tracking with it. I haven't updated them in ages.
- pietroppeter 4y agoMore of this please!
- peter_l_downs 4y agoThis looks like a really cool project, excited to browse through over the holiday break. Just submitted my art blog (https://freezine.xyz https://freezine.xyz), but realized I don't publish an RSS feed. Will have to address and resubmit.
- InCityDreams 4y ago>Best on a desktop browser. Why, oh why....? Stuck in hospital, so much free time free, so many restrictions, and yet so few - what am i missing, or likely to have missed, being on mobile?
- peter_l_downs 4y agoSorry to hear you're in hospital, I hope you get well soon. The warning is there because I don't design the site for mobile, plus there is content hidden around the site that is easiest to find by viewing source or otherwise exploring in a way that mobile browsers don't make easy.
- insane_dreamer 4y agousing on mobile browser (Safari); looking good so far
- pjc50 4y ago.. https://freezine.xyz/1/high-bandwidth/index.html https://freezine.xyz/1/high-bandwidth/index.html needs a strobe warning.
- sirodoht 4y agoThat’s pretty awesome! I maintain something similar: https://collection.mataroa.blog/ https://collection.mataroa.blog/
- rambambram 4y agoWow, big list! I bookmarked it. Ever considered to publish this list as an easily searchable and exportable OPML file?
- perlpimp 4y agoit would be helpful if there was some sort of rss aggregator functionality. Ie google reader that used to be.
- yrds96 4y agoThis is the idea that I always had but never implemented. I'm glad my dream came true.
- cactacea 4y agoDid someone just reinvent Yahoo as it existed in 1994?
- saboot 4y agoI hope so, it was useful then, useful now!
- monkeynotes 4y agoI don't think it's that simple. It was useful then because web discoverability was an unsolved problem, and web content was tiny compared to today. A directory sort of fit the need. As the web grew directories became bloated and hard to navigate, search became more useful. This is more of a nostalgia or niche link list. It's not the same purpose as yahoo in the 90s.
- blowski 4y agoIf you don't think it's useful for you, then don't use it. I like it, so I'm going to use it.
- fnfontana 4y agoI think that search engines like Google are unbeatable to find content that we already know about. On the other hand, those lists are great to discover what we don't already know about, such as new topics, etc. Just like the awesome lists on GitHub.
- mattarm 4y ago> Just like the awesome lists on GitHub. My thought exactly, and also why I don't just search 'latest news' on Google every morning. Human curation is a thing. (not sure how much human curation goes into ooh.directory, but I'm pretty sure they don't use Google's ranking algorithms to surface links)
- 4y ago
- axg11 4y agoI like the aesthetic -- a modern warm Craigslist?
- blowski 4y agoHow on earth do you use a website without full screen parallax stock photos?
- laputan_machine 4y agoVery cool
- robga 4y agoIt reminds me of DMOZ ODP days. Ohh.nostalgia http://www.odp.org/homepage.php http://www.odp.org/homepage.php (archive)
- zozbot234 4y agoDMOZ was and is freely licensed though. This one makes for a nice proof of concept, but there's no mention of availability or reusability for any of this data.
- robga 4y agoDMOZ had an interesting license, as I recall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Directory_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Directory_License https://web.archive.org/web/20070813215202/http://www.dmoz.org/license.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070813215202/http://www.dmoz.o... "The Free Software Foundation describes the ODL as a non-free license" But your point is a good one and well taken.
- zozbot234 4y agoIt was relicensed as CC-BY in 2011, however. AIUI, the ODL even predates CC.
- Minor49er 4y agoYou'll love Curlie which was created by a number of DMOZ alumni https://curlie.org/ https://curlie.org/
- adrianhon 4y agoMore context in this announcement post! https://mastodon.social/@philgyford/109393682988861819 https://mastodon.social/@philgyford/109393682988861819
- asicsp 4y agoReminds me of https://blogsurf.io/ https://blogsurf.io/ which used to have a way to list recent blog posts (but couldn't find a way to do so now). This one has categories and filtering options, nice! Random is good to have (see also https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random)
- the-printer 4y agoThis is cool, shout out to all the directories and lists and aggregators.
- unglaublich 4y agoHumans aggregating what they think is useful for other humans. That is the internet of the past, and hopefully of the future.
- rambambram 4y agoI can't agree more. It's the only way to stand up to the fakery and artificiality of algorithms. I try to make my software 'internet friendly'.
- boplicity 4y agoThe combination of good categorization and high-quality curation make this a very interesting project. Curation, combined with good categorization, is sorely needed in today's internet. The solution of "search" (aka Google) just doesn't cut it if you want to discover the best publications in a topic area. I hope this project takes off!
- prox 4y agoYeah me too! A nice addition would be having account, and being able to like it. Likes are not public, but instead combine to show you things other people liked as well. Since they are not public, hopefully that will discourage gaming it.
- tiffanyh 4y agoDMOZ Remind me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ
- Tade0 4y agoI have to say I enjoy the consistent sub 800ms load times.
- snapcaster 4y agoSite is down :(
- philgyford 4y agoLooks OK from here. What are you seeing? (It's my site.)
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoFirefox gives me this error: Secure Connection Failed An error occurred during a connection to ooh.directory. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified. Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.
- philgyford 4y agoThanks. Strange, not sure why. Lots of people are managing to see it fine, but there's obviously something not quite right somewhere...
- Farow 4y agoWorks fine for me on Firefox 107.
- snapcaster 4y agoJust checked again, not working for me in chrome getting This site can’t be reached
- rchaud 4y agoTime is a flat circle, eh? But all kidding aside, web directories should be much more powerful now than in the 90s. Websites have RSS, and directory websites should be able to automatically monitor things like uptime, and leverage RSS to preview a site's most recent post. I've considered maintaining my own directory on my personal website (a one-way webring if you will), but always stopped because the sites I linked to either died, or were acquired and became something very different.
- nijave 4y agoWell, we have awesome-* in GitHub now. Unfortunately RSS seems to still be hit-or-miss.
- mypetocean 4y agoDo you mind clarifying what you're referring to?
- mitchdoogle 4y agohttps://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
- Semaphor 4y agoThe issue is curation. Many awesome-* lists are just the kitchen sink, with no regard given to quality or stability.
- Minor49er 4y agoRegarding the lifetime of a site, it might be possible to submit requests to the Internet Archive or similar service whenever a site is added to a directory or a new post is found on it. That way too, it would be easier to see when a site is no longer active or when it turned into something else. Then, when it's deactivated, the web directory could just point to the archive first
- mrtksn 4y ago>Time is a flat circle, eh? I prefer Mark Twain's “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” It's pretty obvious that we have come to a stagnant period of online content and there's a desire to move past the glamour of the Instagram and political fights on Twitter and optimised for ad revenue videos on Youtube but I don't think that the personal websites are coming back. Those were cool because only specific type of people were able to build websites, then the code free services for sharing content came along and everybody got online presence but because the medium is the message we are kind of getting tired of the message. There seems to be a search for a new medium. The time for the next verse feels around the corner but I don't think we have found it just yet!
- AndrewStephens 4y agoMore of this kind of thing, please. Any boost privately run blogs get is a welcome respite from the walled gardens of most social media. I am just sad that my very unfocused blog doesn't really fit into any of their categories.
- philgyford 4y agoThere's always "Personal blogs", which is a large number of them.
- AndrewStephens 4y agoI guess I do fit in somewhere, thanks.
- rambambram 4y agoI like how you say on your site that you recently joined Mastodon, while your RSS feed works just fine and I see posts from 2006. ;)
- bsnnkv 4y agoThis gave me a flashback to the final season of "Halt and Catch Fire", which I enjoyed a lot and recommend to anyone who has nostalgic feelings about computing and the internet in the 90s.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 4y agoIt seems that blogs can only be assigned to a single category. What about sites that are dedicated to more than one topic? Nonetheless, this is a really cool project!
- philgyford 4y agoAs it says on the About page (https://ooh.directory/about/ https://ooh.directory/about/): > Some blogs appear in two or, occasionally, three categories. If it would take more than that, it ends up in the wonderland of Uncategorizable.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 4y agoThanks, I somehow missed that. Since there's no way to select multiple categories in the "suggest" form, I take it you will manually amend the entry.
- philgyford 4y agoDefinitely - but it's very useful to start off with a suggestion!
- mellosouls 4y agoCurrent curation rules: https://ooh.directory/about/ https://ooh.directory/about/ - Every blog must have an RSS or Atom feed. - Newsletters aren't included. Some sites are a blog and a newsletter, with identical content, but only those which mainly seem like a blog are included. - Only blogs updated within the past year or so are added. - Tumblrs are only included if they’re either focused on a specific topic or feature original content. - Link blogs are only included if they include original commentary about each link. - No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change, anti-vax ideas, etc.
- RobertRoberts 4y ago> - No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change, anti-vax ideas, etc. I've heard of Twitter accounts getting banned because they mentioned some of these subjects in context of criticizing them. (which is the opposite result that would be expected) How their curation process work is just as important as the rules themselves. If it's transparent and there's a person (not just an automated algorithm), is there also a recourse process for false positives or bad decision making?
- rideontime 4y agoI'm pretty sure Phil is the curator.
- RobertRoberts 4y agoWhat is the "process" for resolving conflicts with Phil? (the key part of my concern)
- alexchamberlain 4y agoEmail him and say "Hi Phil"?
- RobertRoberts 4y ago
- cyrialize 4y agoThis reminds me of Neocities Districts! https://districts.neocities.org/ https://districts.neocities.org/
- marcin32 4y agoI am working on a retail directory: https://usashoplocator.com https://usashoplocator.com
- bradmcgo 4y agoDefinitely checking this out. I’d love to dive into some new blogs that offer in-depth, rich, original content.
- kepano 4y agoI love to see this. The death of blogs and RSS is highly exaggerated. The idea that Google "killed" blogs by killing Google Reader is a meme that is more destructive than Google's act in itself. There are countless healthy and active blogs that you can read via RSS. There are great RSS reader apps. For us technically-minded folks we need to keep being proactive about helping people read the web via RSS, improving discovery, and continually making RSS a first-class option on sites we build.
- onetrickwolf 4y agoI think people seem them as dead because a small percentage of internet users engage with them, but people forget that billions more people have access to the internet now. Even though it's a smaller percentage, the actual number of users has still gone up generally in my experience.
- wpietri 4y agoIt sure didn't help, but I agree that Google Reader's death didn't kill blogs themselves; the decline has been pretty steady (Reader was killed in 2013): https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=rss,blog https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r... I also agree that RSS is still worth it. I am a happy subscriber to Newsblur: https://newsblur.com/ https://newsblur.com/ Indeed, the mess that is Twitter is giving me hope that we'll see a comeback of people self-hosting their content.
- marban 4y agohttps://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com for instance.
- moffkalast 4y ago
- Kye 4y agoThe troubling assumption here is that every site has or depends on ads and cares about rankings. >> "Why would anyone implement it?" Because your assumption is wrong.
- insane_dreamer 4y agoLooks very nice. Unfortunately a lot of good bloggers now use paywalled substack (I don't blame them, I don't have time to write for free either), but this is a good resource for the few that are still gratis.
- komali2 4y agoFun and utterly off topic: I'm on a boat for my partner's birthday, and this "FortiGuard" web security thing they use on their satellite internet that yesterday temporarily prevented us from watching porn together is today preventing me from viewing this cool site, on the grounds: "Newly Observed Domain." Wondering who thought new domains should be blocked "just in case" and how they determine that. What percentage of requests the service receives are domains its never seen before? Assuming 90% or so are like, google, facebook, etc, but what if someone has a phone app that calls weird api domains? Actually that might explain some of the random weird failures I've been seeing on this trip...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- WallyFunk 4y agoBookmarked. Will revisit. Anyone else notice everything old is new again? Neocities[0], Marginalia Search[1], Project Gemini[2], etc There's many others I'm forgetting, and new ones popup on Hackernews each week. Is this just basic nostalgia, people wanting to recreate the dial-up days or even BBS days? [0] https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ [1] https://www.marginalia.nu/ https://www.marginalia.nu/ [2] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
- webscout 4y ago
- BirAdam 4y agoI believe that much of it is, indeed, basic nostalgia. Some of this, however, is also the recognition that not all of the early web was bad. Much of the early internet is viewed through rose-tinted glasses, but some of it was really good. For example, the ability to use a directory to find _exactly_ what you're looking for while search just feeds you two pages of paid result listings. Likewise, gopher made information available on even the most modest of machines (gemini trying to recreate something somewhat better) while modern web can spin up cooling fans on high-end laptop from 2019.
- nibbleshifter 4y agoI recently procured the highest specced out XPS 15 Dell offers, and some modern websites manage to spin the fans to an insane degree.
- partyguy 4y agoYou're right! Even MySpace is back [0] [0] https://spacehey.com/ https://spacehey.com/
- marginalia_nu 4y ago> Is this just basic nostalgia, people wanting to recreate the dial-up days or even BBS days? That's certainly not why I created my search engine. Old isn't an end, its a means to cut the bullshit. Like I read a lot of old books, not because I'm nostalgic for yellowed paper, but because they consistently have much better signal to noise ratio than most of what you'll find on a screen or printed past 1990 or so. (When people bought books in physical book stores and weren't primarily ordering books online, books weren't judged by their page count as a proxy for how much content they contained, and thus had a lot less filler and anecdotes.) If you gave me a method of selection that was as reliable for identifying good books among contemporary books, I'd probably read more contemporary books as a result.
- sneak 4y agoI was thinking of starting a web directory similar to this! I'm glad to see it. Is there an OPML file that lists all of the blogs it knows about?
- rambambram 4y agoSmart request! I recently started collecting blogs on https://www.heyhomepage.com/discover/ https://www.heyhomepage.com/discover/ (almost nothing to see there right now) and I planned to publish the lists of links also as easily searchable and sharable OPML files.
- philgyford 4y agoI will be adding various OPML files at some point.
- jordanmorgan10 4y agoFunny enough, I searched for "iOS" and my blog was the only result haha. Not sure how, or if someone else submitted it. As an aside, I wish JSON feed would've taken off :-/ I know, I know, another standard - but it was a better one I think.
- aliqot 4y agonice :) Now make it a webring with a snippet
- piperswe 4y agoI've been working on something sorta similar, just focused on general websites rather than just blogs: https://webjamboree.net/ https://webjamboree.net/
- rambambram 4y agoNice! Bookmarked it. I also recently started making some portal with curated links and feeds. I call it Discovery Portals. The very small beginning can be found at https://www.heyhomepage.com/discover/ https://www.heyhomepage.com/discover/
- n3storm 4y agoNo linux blogs
- s3000 4y agoThis is the best thing for RSS in a long time. What I miss though for RSS streams is commenting. 'Nobody' reads the articles on link aggregators, (*e: just the comments). In a way, RSS is a link aggregator that limits its user base to the ones who read and don't comment. I am wondering what will happen if RSS readers find a way to share comments on posts. Maybe ActivityPub makes that possible. The only service of which I am aware that allows for comments on RSS is https://linklonk.com/ https://linklonk.com/ . Are there other approaches to bring comments to RSS streams? Maybe ooh.directory can use ActivityPub to allow commenting and voting on the entries. Comments on HN are great to check for problems with an article. That should also be true for comments about entire blogs.
- rambambram 4y ago> What I miss though for RSS streams is commenting. >In a way, RSS is a link aggregator that limits its user base to the ones who read and don't comment. I share this view. What do you think about a concept wherein a collection of followed feeds is presented in a timeline with the possibility to 'comment' with an email form? It will look like a regular comment textarea under some blogpost, but the commenting is done by email. The reaction isn't immediately visible under the blogpost (if at all) and therefor everything works humanly slow. But there's also no signup required, so it's more anonymous and openly accessible.
- s3000 4y ago>a collection of followed feeds is presented in a timeline with the possibility to 'comment' From my point of view, that's the future. Using mail is dangerous because it is another protocol, and it still requires account management because nobody will post to arbitrary pages with their primary mail address. That said, mail still has the potential to become the standard for social networks. Why should comments not be immediately visible? People can already write mails to authors. That's not what builds momentum. The interesting part is the interaction of the audience. We can build social interaction that improves direct human interaction in the same way that cars improve human movement. I wouldn't focus on slowing it down but on speeding up the filtering so that it is easy to find the individually preferred audience among all possible reactions to an url. The difficult part is to maintain group identities and momentum when all comments are dissected and re-aggregated. It's problematic to manage comments on the server of a blog post. This creates silos and echo chambers because it is difficult to find the comments of a user on other blogs and creators rarely allow their audience to create their own posts. Newspapers with their comment sections already offer that protocol. We have Facebook because newspapers missed out on coming together and offering the missing parts. What is missing at Linklonk, apart from opening up to ActivityPub, is long-term conversations on posts. On aggregators like HN, there is an audience at the top comments. Hardly anybody writes comments on old posts. To make comments on off-momentum articles worthwhile, it would be necessary to have a notification function that is triggered not only by replies but also by new comments when they pass a threshold.
- xtracto 4y agoReminds me of an old site I used to frequent in the late 1990s: https://web.archive.org/web/19991129033212/http://www.wannalearn.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/19991129033212/http://www.wannal... Back then, it had a lot of very interesting info to learn about several subjects. I yearn for that internet.
- dutchbrit 4y agoLooks like the site currently doesn't know how to serve PHP/you download their source code for the homepage when visiting.
- davedx 4y agoNot OP's first rodeo. I was exploring his website and found on archive.org his first web directory, from 1998! https://web.archive.org/web/19980628182433/http://www.gyford.com/haddock/ https://web.archive.org/web/19980628182433/http://www.gyford...
- colinprince 4y agosee also Today's Guardian: https://guardian.gyford.com/ https://guardian.gyford.com/
- msephton 4y agoThis is more of a link list, rather than RSS directory. But cool find!
- zadler 4y agoLove to see this
- andrewstuart 4y agoShould be called oohya.directory
- felipelalli 4y agoI miss directories. The hard part is to keep it up to date and delete unreachable sites. Also flag the inactive ones. I don't know if this site does this.
- msephton 4y agoIt has most recent post from each blog. Maybe blogs will be hidden/deleted when that gets longer than a year or so?
- philgyford 4y agoAt the moment I've only added blogs that have been updated within the past year or so. But over time some blogs will obviously stop updating. It's currently possible to filter each category to only show blogs that have been updated within the past week/month/year, which should help. If it gets to the point where there are lots of blogs that are still live, but haven't been updated for a long time, maybe I'll make the default to only show blogs that have been updated within a year or so. We'll see. I can see which blogs generate errors of different kinds when fetching their feeds, so I'll be able to spot blogs that disappear. If that happens they'll be removed/hidden from the site.
- docmars 4y ago"No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change, anti-vax ideas, etc." Well that's a shame, there's quite a few out there that pose credible and interesting questions and discussions around some of these topics. Basically this is saying: "No conservative blogs allowed" which erases at least 50% or more of the population's musings. I'd love to see an aggregator that isn't politically motivated and biased as this one is. The internet would be a better, freer place. We may even find that these "hateful", "alarming" ideas are in fact mainstream after all and being unfairly suppressed by sites like these as well as legacy media, social media, etc. under the guise of the greater good.
- alimov 4y ago> Basically this is saying: "No conservative blogs allowed" which erases at least 50% or more of the population's musings. Curious which population (country?) you are referring to that’s 50% or more conservative
- docmars 4y agoThe United States, judging by voting numbers in the last 2 Presidential elections. 50% is obviously a rough rounding, and serves as a figure of speech.
- ranger47 4y agoSpreading misinformation is a VERY different thing from constructive discussion of different takes on an issue. Anyone taking offense to a request like this can't tell the difference.
- docmars 4y agoValid discussions and critiques on the prescribed narratives are all labeled as "misinformation" conveniently and expressly because the holders of the legacy media narratives are in power and do not wish to be challenged. Common examples are: medical practitioners blowing the whistle on vaccine injuries, or recommending treatments to illnesses that have been demonized by media outlets. You would be shocked at how many things no longer exist, but previously existed with incredible support and numbers behind them. Everything from Facebook groups, YouTube videos, blog posts, websites, etc. -- too many mediums to list, and yet, unreferenceable here because they've been taken down by the liberal moderation machine who's unwilling to view their opponents as valid participants of grander dialogues, so instead, enact policies of erasure rather than honest debate. It is not a fair game when those who are in power _are_ the ones deciding what can and cannot exist in the public scene, causing them to remain unchallenged, and prevents their political opponents from obtaining power by suppressing their use of the standard avenues of communication.
- afarrell 4y agoThis design is really pleasing to my eye.
- tracker1 4y agoLooks like an early version of Yahoo!
- quriosity 4y ago
- CrypticShift 4y agoMany of you surely remember Technorati. It was one of the first popular RSS blog aggregators. was it a directory too? I forgot. https://web.archive.org/web/20080529000125/http://technorati.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080529000125/http://technorati... Nowadays, I find Feedly topics a good place to explore RSS sources. I believe it is human curation, so it is kind of a directory too (though less "indie" and not restricted to blogs). You can sort by Followers (=popularity) and articles/week.
- riffraff 4y agoYes it also worked as a directory. When I started blogging again some time ago my first question was what might be the modern equivalent, and I found none.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- b1nj0y 4y agoI'd like to recommend TabHub: https://tabhub.github.io https://tabhub.github.io, you can read rss in new tab. Also there're tools that helps you to create rss feed for sites which have no rss feed: https://github.com/tabhub/rssify https://github.com/tabhub/rssify
- fnordpiglet 4y agoBob Loblaws Law Blog. Just throwing that out there.
- toyg 4y ago"No blogs were found matching motorbikes." Sadface.jpg