Time is a flat circle, eh?<p>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.<p>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.
I 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.<p>There are countless healthy and active blogs that you can read via RSS. There are great RSS reader apps.<p>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.
Bookmarked. Will revisit.<p>Anyone else notice everything old is new again? Neocities[0], Marginalia Search[1], Project Gemini[2], etc<p>There's many others I'm forgetting, and new ones popup on Hackernews each week.<p>Is this just basic nostalgia, people wanting to recreate the dial-up days or even BBS days?<p>[0] <a href="https://neocities.org/" rel="nofollow">https://neocities.org/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.marginalia.nu/" rel="nofollow">https://www.marginalia.nu/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://gemini.circumlunar.space/" rel="nofollow">https://gemini.circumlunar.space/</a>
This 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.<p>I am wondering what will happen if RSS readers find a way to share comments on posts. Maybe ActivityPub makes that possible.<p>The only service of which I am aware that allows for comments on RSS is <a href="https://linklonk.com/" rel="nofollow">https://linklonk.com/</a> .
Are there other approaches to bring comments to RSS streams?<p>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.
The combination of good categorization and high-quality curation make this a very interesting project.<p>Curation, combined with good categorization, is sorely needed in today's internet.<p>The solution of "search" (aka Google) just doesn't cut it if you want to discover the best publications in a topic area.<p>I hope this project takes off!
Not OP's first rodeo. I was exploring his website and found on archive.org his first web directory, from 1998! <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19980628182433/http://www.gyford.com/haddock/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/19980628182433/http://www.gyford...</a>
More context in this announcement post!<p><a href="https://mastodon.social/@philgyford/109393682988861819" rel="nofollow">https://mastodon.social/@philgyford/109393682988861819</a>
It reminds me of DMOZ ODP days.<p>Ohh.nostalgia<p><a href="http://www.odp.org/homepage.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.odp.org/homepage.php</a> (archive)
Current curation rules:<p><a href="https://ooh.directory/about/" rel="nofollow">https://ooh.directory/about/</a><p>- Every blog must have an RSS or Atom feed.<p>- 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.<p>- Only blogs updated within the past year or so are added.<p>- Tumblrs are only included if they’re either focused on a specific topic or feature original content.<p>- Link blogs are only included if they include original commentary about each link.<p>- No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change, anti-vax ideas, etc.
This looks like a really cool project, excited to browse through over the holiday break. Just submitted my art blog (<a href="https://freezine.xyz" rel="nofollow">https://freezine.xyz</a>), but realized I don't publish an RSS feed. Will have to address and resubmit.
Many of you surely remember Technorati. It was one of the first popular RSS blog aggregators. was it a directory too? I forgot.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080529000125/http://technorati.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20080529000125/http://technorati...</a><p>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.
Reminds me of <a href="https://blogsurf.io/" rel="nofollow">https://blogsurf.io/</a> which used to have a way to list recent blog posts (but couldn't find a way to do so now).<p>This one has categories and filtering options, nice! Random is good to have (see also <a href="https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random" rel="nofollow">https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random</a>)
I've been working on something sorta similar, just focused on general websites rather than just blogs: <a href="https://webjamboree.net/" rel="nofollow">https://webjamboree.net/</a>
More of this kind of thing, please. Any boost privately run blogs get is a welcome respite from the walled gardens of most social media.<p>I am just sad that my very unfocused blog doesn't really fit into any of their categories.
DMOZ<p>Remind me of <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ</a>
This reminds me of Neocities Districts! <a href="https://districts.neocities.org/" rel="nofollow">https://districts.neocities.org/</a>
This 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.
I was thinking of starting a web directory similar to this! I'm glad to see it.<p>Is there an OPML file that lists all of the blogs it knows about?
I 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.
It seems that blogs can only be assigned to a single category. What about sites that are dedicated to more than one topic?<p>Nonetheless, this is a really cool project!
I'd like to recommend TabHub: <a href="https://tabhub.github.io" rel="nofollow">https://tabhub.github.io</a>, you can read rss in new tab.<p>Also there're tools that helps you to create rss feed for sites which have no rss feed:
<a href="https://github.com/tabhub/rssify" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tabhub/rssify</a>
Reminds me of an old site I used to frequent in the late 1990s:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19991129033212/http://www.wannalearn.com:80/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/19991129033212/http://www.wannal...</a><p>Back then, it had a lot of very interesting info to learn about several subjects. I yearn for that internet.
Terrific. 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.
I 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.
Funny enough, I searched for "iOS" and my blog was the only result haha. Not sure how, or if someone else submitted it.<p>As an aside, I wish JSON feed would've taken off :-/ I know, I know, another standard - but it <i>was</i> a better one I think.
Looks 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.
Fun 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."<p>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...
"No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change, anti-vax ideas, etc."<p>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.<p>Basically this is saying: "No conservative blogs allowed" which erases at least 50% or more of the population's musings.<p>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.<p>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.