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.

W17: 1180 posts
W18: 2163 posts
W19: 2119 posts
W20: 2095 posts
W21: 2075 posts
W22: 2012 posts
W23: 1839 posts
W24: 1925 posts
W25: 1918 posts
W26: 1936 posts
W27: 1899 posts
W28: 1894 posts
W29: 1903 posts
W30: 1881 posts
W31: 1962 posts
W32: 1921 posts
W33: 1786 posts
W34: 1830 posts
W35: 2039 posts
W36: 1937 posts
W37: 1857 posts
W38: 1860 posts
W39: 1874 posts
W40: 1939 posts
W41: 1894 posts
W42: 1601 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.