7 ms·
Ooh.directory: a place to find good blogs that interest you
- redmattred 8mo agoThis 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.
- ehecatl42 8mo ago> No blogs or categories were found matching emacs. OK then.
- wilkystyle 8mo agoYou can be the first! (I'd be interested!)
- throwaway150 8mo agoI've submitted entries but they never get added. I have no idea how they decide what makes it into the directory and what doesn't so I've stopped trying.
- rambambram 8mo ago[flagged]
- alansaber 8mo agoVim wins again
- 8organicbits 8mo agoThere's an RSS planet that curates blogs about emacs, for anyone who is looking. https://planet.emacslife.com/ https://planet.emacslife.com/ I've been building a list of blog lists, and I know of 136 feeds that use that category tag. (Open filters, select emacs under category, adjust language as needed). https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/discover/ https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/discover/
- throwaway150 8mo ago>> No blogs or categories were found matching emacs. > OK then. Exactly. This is a deeper problem with ooh.directory, that the review process is opaque. They do not explain why something is added or rejected. I do not care much about Emacs itself but I submitted several of my favourite bloggers who write about retrogames, gaming rigs, and custom keyboards. None of them were added. None at all. I do not think we should be encouraging closed directories like this in the community. I would much rather see a transparent directory where the review process is clear.
- philgyford 8mo agoYou do seem particularly offended or annoyed that some blogs you suggested have not yet appeared on the site. You can read the FAQ article to see the criteria for what’s accepted, and also reasons why suggested blogs haven’t yet appeared. Ultimately it’s my own hobby site and so I decide what is “good” or “interesting” - so long as it meets the other criteria.
- throwaway150 8mo ago> You do seem particularly offended or annoyed that some blogs you suggested have not yet appeared on the site. I'm not offended. Just a little frustrated that I took the time to make some submissions of blogs I thought were missing but never heard anything back. But you're right that it is your hobby site, so you get to decide what goes in.
- kjs3 8mo agoThe sole person running this site doesn't find the same things interesting than you do. How dare they. The sense of entitlement displayed is really breathtaking.
- throwaway150 8mo ago> The sole person running this site doesn't find the same things interesting than you do. That misses the point. I know the site is run by a single maintainer and they are free to accept or decline whatever they choose. I have no qualms about it. > The sense of entitlement displayed is really breathtaking. Calling something "entitlement" is an easy way to shut down discussion without engaging with the argument. Labeling a concern instead of addressing it feels like a weak response. Good thing is that the maintainer did address my concern in a separate reply instead of just shrugging it off as "entitlement" and for that I'm thankful to him. I respect the maintainer's authority over their own site. The only thing I am asking for is a bit of courtesy in return for the effort spent curating and submitting material. I do not expect submissions to be accepted, only that rejected ones receive a brief acknowledgement. If expecting that minimal level of courtesy counts as entitlement, then so be it. We all operate within a shared community, and I am only asking for the kind of consideration I try to extend to others myself. If you missed it, I've also apologized to the maintainer for being a pain in these threads. My comments come off as overly negative and I'm aware of that. For that I apologize. But I also want to say that my frustration comes from putting effort into collecting good blogs (retrocomputing and gaming kind), submitting them, and then seeing no response or action. The maintainer has since explained that there's a large backlog which makes the situation understandable. So in the end, all I can do is apologize. But suggesting that I'm somehow challenging the maintainer's right to make decisions about their own project is both inaccurate and disingenuous.
- philgyford 8mo agolol Even after the site being on HN last time, and getting hundreds and hundreds of tech blog suggestions as a result, none of them were about emacs. What are your favourite emacs blogs?
- simonw 8mo agoGiven 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.
- gesis 8mo agoLet's bring back the webring.
- 8organicbits 8mo agoI joined a web ring last year, but I'm uncertain about it. Modern web rings tend to automate updates to the next/prev buttons, so I'm never sure what I'm linking to. The web ring owner acts as curator, but I don't know how much effort they put in to keep slop or other undesirable content out.
- BoingBoomTschak 8mo agoI'm part of one and I don't think it really promotes discoverability. What could work would be some kind of search engine restricted to said webring to make a button to list similar articles. At least I would click on such a button!
- sixeyes 8mo agoI'm on the Merveilles ring and it has such a local/"neighbourhood" search, hosted by one of the members: https://lieu.cblgh.org https://lieu.cblgh.org Pretty cool, and seems easy to set up
- roxolotl 8mo agoThe no ai webring is full of really unique stuff. There’s definitively people out there still doing webrings. Now we need a metawebring. https://baccyflap.com/noai/ https://baccyflap.com/noai/
- cosmicgadget 8mo ago
- PaulRobinson 8mo agoA 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?
- gnramires 8mo agoI like the idea of some kind of algorithm minimalism, or at least parsimony; but I also think sometimes it might be appropriate? In this case, another approach would simply be randomization, which doesn't favor any name (Aaaaaron Aaaaanderson's blog :P ), this randomization can be consistent (such that you can find something you wish in linear time). I think equally important is algorithmic transparency, that is, that the algorithm be publicly disclosed (although I think simplicity is a component of transparency: if you just dump a huge incomprehensible algorithmic mess somewhere that's not very helpful), so that you at least know what you are getting into, and better yet have some ability to choose and make educated critique of the current state of things (i.e. does the algorithm just maximize engagement like a slot machine? or does it optimize for some kind of helpfulness?).
- philgyford 8mo agoThanks for the kind words. The source is user suggestions and my own searching and browsing. I do sort of track outbound links, so that I can show which domains a blog links to most, which can sometimes give a sense of what the blog is about. But, while I haven’t analysed the data, I suspect the links from one blog to another would be a very tiny percentage of the overall outbound links. It’s the kind of thing that might have been more interesting/useful in the olden days of blogging when more people linked to each other, and replied to each other, via blogs rather than social media.
- nefsim 8mo ago[dead]
- sdoering 8mo agoAgreed. I also like the small web lens in kagi. Helps me to search through and find interesting stuff to read and follow.
- listenfaster 8mo ago+1 for Kari. You’ll find smaller, less SEO’d sites favored in their search results. From https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/noads.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/noads.html: “Kagi Search is an ad-free search engine that will actively down-rank sites with lots of ads and trackers in the results and promote sites with little or no advertising”
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- 8organicbits 8mo agoYou may be interested in a browser extension I launched at the end of last year. It keeps track of RSS feeds as you browse, helping you stay connected to the small web sites you discover. https://github.com/robalexdev/blog-quest https://github.com/robalexdev/blog-quest
- cosmicgadget 8mo agoMy buddy and I are building an index with a category interface like this one (and indieseek.xyz). We index anything we consider authentic and contentful, but our category interface (mostly) consists of small web pages. Happy to hear any feedback. Link: https://outerweb.org/explore-sorted https://outerweb.org/explore-sorted
- sofayam 8mo agoStrange, I looked around and couldn’t find a single contentful or authentic site in your index, rather the opposite.
- ramon156 8mo agoI'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 :)
- 8organicbits 8mo agoI 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/ 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 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.
- zozbot234 8mo agoTaxonomy labels are often deduplicated on Wikidata, the unofficial "hub" of the modern Semantic Web. There's already a defined property for matching DMOZ/Curlie labels, and others could be added if relevant.
- engelo_b 8mo ago[dead]
- cosmicgadget 8mo agoI'm not sure where they are at this moment, but a while back Google seemed to abandon EEAT and SEOed pages in favor of pure domain authority. So it no longer mattered if you page had the all-important "Key Takeaways". Blogs are still discoverable via aggregators and link sharing. But those are ephemeral, directories like this and search engines like marginalia are important resources.
- voy707 8mo agothe internet got just a little bit more human again.
- throwaway150 8mo agoThe problem with https://ooh.directory/ 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.
- esafak 8mo agoAn RSS feed of changes would help.
- philgyford 8mo agoThere should be a feed of “Recently added blogs” linked right on the home page! Oh, hang on, what’s that I see on the home page?
- 7bit 8mo agoAnd then what? You're looking at a list of hundreds of submissions and why they have been added or not added, which completely defeats the purpose of that website. I don't get the point of these sites, because it I want a curated list, I visit the front page of hackernews or reddit -- and trust the system. Ohh.directory I'd the same thing, except for a different selection process. You either trust it or you don't.
- throwaway150 8mo ago> You either trust it or you don't. don't see why it has to be this way. It doesn't take much to tell us what the review process is like and what gets added and what does not. If I know in advance that the blogs I submit are outside their scope, then I won't waste time submitting them. I also don't see why there can't be an open directory of websites where the community makes decisions about what to add instead of leaving it to a single individual.
- 8mo ago
- tiffanyh 8mo agohttps://minifeed.net https://minifeed.net is another similar site that I’ve enjoyed.
- freetonik 8mo agoI also maintain a human-curated directory (and search engine) of personal blogs at https://minifeed.net https://minifeed.net You can submit a blog here: https://minifeed.net/suggest 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.
- throwaway150 8mo agoThis looks great. Your https://minifeed.net/about https://minifeed.net/about page is really nice too. Well done! You should make it a top level post if you haven't already
- freetonik 8mo agoI've been meaning to do this for a year now, still feel like there are things to improve before I do that :)
- ranger_danger 8mo ago> Must be written by a human How does one ascertain this?
- wonger_ 8mo agoHonor system and smell test, I would think
- rebel_druid 8mo agoFrom 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.
- coffeecoders 8mo agoI am a fan of https://blogs.hn/ https://blogs.hn/. It is mostly HN-like content, but I visit it daily. I wish there was a "new" view though.
- itrinity 8mo agoNice nostalgia but are these directories actually being used by anyone?
- unsungNovelty 8mo agoI am pretty happy with https://marginalia-search.com/ 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.
- myk-e 8mo agopretty sweet!
- wanderingbit 8mo agoThis has already helped me find extremely useful writings on a niche topic of mine. Thank you!
- unsungNovelty 8mo agoJust sharing what I know. :)
- freediver 8mo agoJust worked on adding categories to Kagi Small Web (inspired in part by OOH) last night. https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb This did give it a new dimension. Each has its own RSS feed too as well.
- bcraven 8mo agoIt feels like we're _so_ close to having StumbleUpon back.
- tommica 8mo agoIt was an amazing site. Just click on the bookmark and discover something new.
- Curiositry 8mo agohttps://www.readsomethinginteresting.com/ https://www.readsomethinginteresting.com/
- gdulli 8mo agoThat's great, will you also add the category field to the text file in the repo? These projects are often heavy on tech blogs and I'd like to filter those out.
- freediver 8mo agoWe are classifying them at runtime, per entry. More accurate and LLMs are cheap.
- juleshenry 8mo agoWow, 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- https://github.com/juleshenry/-shtetltleths-
- zahlman 8mo agoI'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.
- philgyford 8mo agoThat’s one problem with categorising blogs - they often shift focus over time, like Simon’s. I’ve added it to the AI category now - thanks for pointing that out!
- cosmicgadget 8mo agoQuick, Simon, pivot to cooking!
- deadbabe 8mo agoPlease 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.
- philgyford 8mo agoIt’s not “useless” it just depends on what it is a user is looking for. I decided that alphabetical as default makes most immediate sense to someone arriving at the site. “Last updated” could also look a bit random initially.
- deadbabe 8mo agoBut random orders lend themselves better for discovery? If somebody’s site is just AAA they will be at the top of the list forever, what value is there in that?
- philgyford 8mo agoThe value is that it's slightly easier to browse an alphabetical list than a random one (no, I don't have a citation for this). But, yes, it would be nice to have the option to change the sort order, as well as the current filtering. One day, if it doesn't make the UI too complicated. I value simplicity.
- deadbabe 8mo agoif you know what you're looking for sure, but what if you're not looking for any specific site in particular, like the vast majority of people who visit?
- philgyford 8mo agoThat's the kind of visitor I was talking about.
- rubyfan 8mo agoooh 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.
- d_silin 8mo agoHave another look at this great project! https://hnpwd.github.io/ https://hnpwd.github.io/
- rednafi 8mo agoI have a page on my site dedicated to list the blogs I frequent: https://rednafi.com/blogroll/ https://rednafi.com/blogroll/
- Lucent 8mo agoTurns out my blog is actually a newsletter? Seems like a distinction without a difference.
- philgyford 8mo agoI'd argue there is a difference between a blog and a newsletter, but that would take longer to discuss than I have right now. But you're right that the boundary between the two is extremely blurry. However, I'm guessing you tried to submit a Substack URL and was told newsletters aren't accepted? Even if I allowed newsletters, I wouldn't add any Substack newsletters because of the platform's fascist-supporting tendencies.
- ksec 8mo agoDoes 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.
- brightbed 8mo agoOpened it, and two clicks in I immediately found a blog that made me say “woah”. Success!
- dang 8mo agoRelated. Others? A collection of 2,299 blogs about every topic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40693787 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36458877 - June 2023 (6 comments) Ooh.directory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33719983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33719983 - Nov 2022 (167 comments)
- frenzcan 8mo agoWow, I’m making this my homepage.
- mrmagoo17 8mo agoWow! Somehow my personal/tech blog is listed there. If the author is reading, thanks for including it. I am flattered!
- guites 8mo agoI'm working on something similar for Brazilian blogs. For now it's a collection of ~500 blogs, and I plan to expand it by following external links found in these blogs and then somehow finding out which are links to other br blogs. Not really a curated list, but I would welcome projects that filter the existing blogs into categories and etc. https://guilhermegarcia.dev/brcrawl https://guilhermegarcia.dev/brcrawl
- rdmuser 8mo agoOh neat! I went and shared this with some Brazilian friends of mine. They tend to like stuff like this so I think it will make them happy. I know I enjoyed checking out some sites you have in that list (using translation) so thanks! I love browsing outside the anglosphere but it can be challenging sometimes finding curators that find regular new sites or posts to check out when other languages aren't part of your regular browsing routine.
- polote 8mo agoOn https://hnblogs.substack.com/ https://hnblogs.substack.com/ blog posts published on HN are collected everyday
- MillionOClock 8mo agoI just discovered this site and found it interesting, just a bit of feedback: AFAICT there is no way to filter between paywalled and non-paywalled websites, I wish there was one!
- philgyford 8mo agoI wouldn't intentionally add a site that is entirely paywalled, so let me know if you come across one!
- MillionOClock 8mo agoUnfortunately I forgot which site it was and did not check if it was entirely paywalled, but if I find it again and it is I will let you know! Thank you!
- khet 8mo agoI love that blogging is taking off a bit again, and I think this trend will last. I built BoredReading.com a few years ago because I enjoy reading but hate having to curate my own feeds, so this is a done for you kinda app.
- anthk 8mo agoThe best blogs are at https://wiby.me https://wiby.me
- teotimepacreau 8mo agosadly ooh.directory is like many others indie blog directories english only. We need more foreign languages indie blogs. Mine is : https://www.teotimepacreau.fr/blog https://www.teotimepacreau.fr/blog
- bebhuvan 8mo ago[dead]
- renegat0x0 8mo agoIn my database of Internet links I have many personal blogs: - https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
- thiagowfx 8mo agoExhaustive list of all blog directories I’ve heard of: https://perrotta.dev/2025/05/blog-directories/ https://perrotta.dev/2025/05/blog-directories/ (includes ooh.directory)