indieblog.page

Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time.

Frequently asked Questions

These questions might have been asked frequently if I hadn't answered them here ;-)

Why does this site exist?

Because I wanted it.

There is a small renaissance of having your own, personal website, independent of the large corporate entities. A place for your thoughts and ideas that you own and control. It's sometimes called the IndieWeb or SmolNet - back in my day it was just having a homepage.

I love reading text written by real people. Texts that don't want to sell something. But how can you discover texts you can't search for because you don't know they exist?

That's where this page comes in. Click a button, be surprised and maybe discover your new favorite thing.

What are the sources?

I initially seeded the database with personal websites from the following sources:

To further grow it, you can suggest your own or a friend's personal site (as long as it has an RSS feed): Suggest a page.

How many blogs and posts are in the database?

Here are the current statistics:

Currently only recent posts (published within the last six months) are used when picking a random post. Below is a visualization of the number of recent posts per week.

W48: 2298 posts
W49: 2375 posts
W50: 2144 posts
W51: 2232 posts
W52: 2085 posts
W53: 911 posts
W00: 1966 posts
W01: 2233 posts
W02: 2224 posts
W03: 2311 posts
W04: 2608 posts
W05: 2542 posts
W06: 2364 posts
W07: 2407 posts
W08: 2465 posts
W09: 2329 posts
W10: 2179 posts
W11: 2118 posts
W12: 2199 posts
W13: 2236 posts
W14: 2150 posts
W15: 2159 posts
W16: 2144 posts
W17: 2217 posts
W18: 2221 posts
W19: 2113 posts
W20: 1273 posts
Can I have the data?

Sure, you can download the list of blog URLs as JSON here:

Download JSON

Broken Links, Spam, etc.

People abandon or sell their domains. Things break. Sites get hacked.

If you were sent to a broken site, please let me know at andi@splitbrain.org. Be sure to include the ID shown under each visited link on the front page - it helps me to identify the broken URLs.

Please also let me know if you come across things that don't fit the spirit of personal webpages. Things like YouTube channels, corporate blogs, etc. should not be in the index but might have slipped through in the initial setup.

Are there any alternatives?

There are other attempts at making the indieweb discoverable.

What tech does this run on?

This is a very simple, custom PHP application standing on the shoulders of giants:

The rest is just glue code. You can see it all on Github.