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.

W11: 1287 posts
W12: 2296 posts
W13: 2342 posts
W14: 2234 posts
W15: 2258 posts
W16: 2243 posts
W17: 2341 posts
W18: 2359 posts
W19: 2238 posts
W20: 2263 posts
W21: 2386 posts
W22: 2336 posts
W23: 2382 posts
W24: 2191 posts
W25: 2575 posts
W26: 2334 posts
W27: 2228 posts
W28: 2245 posts
W29: 2265 posts
W30: 2488 posts
W31: 2430 posts
W32: 2352 posts
W33: 2248 posts
W34: 2267 posts
W35: 2167 posts
W36: 2027 posts
Can I have the data?

Sure, here you go:

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.

I have some issues with the search!

The search indexes the feed contents only, it will not spider your site like a traditional search engine. For that to work best, full-text feeds are recommended. It may take a while until new or updated posts appear in the search results.

The search is kindly provided by Alex Schroeder. If you have any issues or questions regarding it, please contact Alex directly. Either by mail or on Mastodon.