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.

W47: 1358 posts
W48: 2148 posts
W49: 2047 posts
W50: 2029 posts
W51: 2008 posts
W52: 2033 posts
W01: 2394 posts
W02: 2277 posts
W03: 2070 posts
W04: 2116 posts
W05: 2288 posts
W06: 2119 posts
W07: 2099 posts
W08: 2106 posts
W09: 2058 posts
W10: 2419 posts
W11: 1999 posts
W12: 1964 posts
W13: 2056 posts
W14: 2009 posts
W15: 1993 posts
W16: 1964 posts
W17: 2054 posts
W18: 2037 posts
W19: 1937 posts
W20: 1117 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.