The Indie Internet Index, another new directory of independent websites

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The Indie Internet Index, another new directory of independent websites

8 April 2026

Hot on the heels of Monday’s link to indie/independent blog post aggregator Blogosphere, comes the Indie Internet Index. The importance of these sorts of resources cannot be understated at a time when the independent, open web, is under increasing threat.

Blogosphere: an algorithm free blog post aggregator

6 April 2026

The new (to me at least) aggregator of blog posts aptly and cleverly titled Blogosphere, is the creation of engineer and writer Ramkarthik Krishnamurthy:

But it’s really about something bigger: rebuilding a thriving community of independent writers and thinkers who share their thoughts freely, without waiting for an algorithm to decide who gets to see them.

A list of recent blog posts can also be viewed in a more simple text style format. In addition, both listings of posts have their own RSS feeds.

Blogosphere joins other fine IndieWeb/SmallWeb blog post aggregators including Blogs Are Back, Blogroll Club, Blogroll, Feedle, powRSS, Oceania Web Atlas, and ooh.directory, to name but a few.

Twitter, the upstart social media platform that stunted the growth, and more, of the web

24 March 2026

Dave Winer:

A bit of history. Read this post from 20 years ago by Phil Jones. That’s what I was trying to do back then, just as Twitter came online. I didn’t know it then but was the moment when the web stopped growing.

I don’t think, in 2006, anyone realised, nor could have realised, the profound impact Twitter, as one of the earliest social media platforms, was going to have, specifically on blogs and websites, and more generally, and later, the web.

Twitter launched smack bang in the middle of a period often referred to as the golden age of blogging, a time when websites and blogs seemed invincible and invulnerable. Believe it or not, they were the only game in town.

If anything was going to change the status quo, it wasn’t going to be some upstart microblogging platform where people said too much about their private lives, and what they had for lunch.

How wrong we were. But who was to know, back then, how influential and powerful the social media platforms would become, and potential threat they posed to the free flow of news and information.

It is possible to escape this quagmire by creating, collaboratively, a social media platform, impervious to the grips of monopoly control, and tech-billionaires? I thought we already had, in the form of Mastodon and Bluesky, but no one can agree which is the right model.

Is there a third way of some sort? And if so, will this option gain sufficient traction, nullify the platforms we want nullified, or remain a niche offering, like the alternatives presently available?

When it comes to social media platforms twenty years after Twitter arrived, it seems like we only go in circles. Ever decreasing circles.

Font Awesome cans renaming plans for Eleventy static site generator

17 March 2026

Proposals were afoot to rename Eleventy — often styled 11ty — a blog publishing platform favoured by some Indie/Small Web bloggers, as Build Awesome.

The awesome part of 11ty’s would-be new name derives from Font Awesome, producers of a wide range of icons website publishers can make use of. I’ve used their icons in the past, in place of the text menu items presently in the animated colour bar above the title of this post.

11ty was acquired by Font Awesome in September 2024.

To accompany the renaming, a Kickstarter campaign was, from what I can tell, launched to fund development of a more commercial “website builder” version of 11ty, while the original blog publishing platform would remain free to use.

But both the fund raiser, and renaming plans, have been paused after Font Awesome claimed only a handful of emails promoting the Kickstarter campaign had reached intended recipients.

A backlash by 11ty publishers against the renaming proposal however seems the more likely reason.

Even though 11ty creator Zach Leatherman joined Font Awesome at the time of the acquisition, the company appears to have completely misunderstood the veneration in which the blogging platform, as 11ty, is held by publishers. Why even consider changing the name of such a highly regarded product in the first place, and worse still contemplate something like Build Awesome?

Get listed in the 2026 Internet Phone Book

14 March 2026

The second edition of the Internet Phone Book is in the works, and publishers of personal websites are being invited to submit their URL.

I was stoked to be included in the inaugural edition, compiled last year by Kristoffer Tjalve and Elliott Cost, and you can still call me on 492.

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blogs, books, publishing

New AI tool intends to streamline using WordPress.com blogs

25 February 2026

The new tool will look after some aspects of the design and maintenance of a WordPress.com blog.

As I understand it, the AI assistant will not write content, though it can “edit and refine” posts if asked. The assistant however can create custom images upon prompt. Anything you like — within reason — by the sounds of things.

Many of the bloggers I read dislike using AI in their actual writing, but may make limited use of the technology for research, or, say, for editing their work. I don’t do that myself (though maybe I should for editing, fixing typos, etc.), but think that’s a choice for the individual to make.

I see an upside to the new WordPress.com feature though. An AI assistant might encourage a few more people to take up blogging, given it takes care of what is considered by some to be the more technical parts of the process.

Editing the appearance of a theme, for example, which some people probably find daunting. The assistant won’t quite put WordPress.com blogs on an equal footing with social media platforms, in terms of ease of use, but it might be seen as step in the right direction.

So long as the AI assistant limits its activities to design and maintenance functions, and does not expand into composing posts, all should be well…

Substack reportedly asking Australian users to verify their age

2 February 2026

According to a Reddit thread, that was re-posted at Marginal Revolution, the online publishing platform is requesting users in Australia submit to an age verification process.

Substack, as of the time I type, is not on the list of websites, or services, that Australians under the age of sixteen cannot access, so I’m not sure why Substack would be doing this. If indeed they are.

On a visit to Substack, again, as of the time I write this, I was able to access, and move around the site without hindrance. I was not logged in, but was using an Australian ISP.

Evidently some people are having difficulty though. Possibly age verification only applies to people in Australia who are logging in to gain access. I might try doing this another time.

But Substack is a platform, and who knows, may one day be added to the banned list. This is precisely why online writers should be publishing from their own, independent website, and not a platform.

And this is before addressing the concerns many people have with Substack in the first place.

Blogs are Back: easily follow website and blog RSS feeds with one-click

26 January 2026

Subscribing to RSS feeds is my preferred option for following websites, but for people unfamiliar with the really simple syndication system, doing so can be daunting.

I’ve long thought subscribing to a website needs to be as easy as following someone on a social network. Tap the follow button to follow, and you’re following.

But following a RSS feed — doubtless something anyone reading this post could do in their sleep — isn’t necessarily straightforward. People first require a suitable RSS reader, again, something that’s easy when you know how. Then they need to go about the process of obtaining the URL of the RSS feed they wish to subscribe to.

But there’s more than one click involved in this process. While it’s easy as pie for some of us, I can see why many people decide not to bother, or simply stay on the socials instead.

Blogs are Back, created by Travis Van Nimwegen, an American software engineer, might be a solution to the one-click subscribe conundrum. Blogs are Back is two things: a directory of personal websites and blogs, and a simple way of following the RSS feeds of listed blogs.

Click the follow button of a website of your choosing, and that’s it.

Posts from any website a Blogs are Back user subscribes to will be visible in the integrated RSS reader. There’s also an option to submit a blog if it’s not already in the directory, and the more websites present, the better.

I’m not sure if an ubiquitous app/website, allowing people who know nothing at all about RSS, to follow RSS feeds with ease, will emerge — it seems to me RSS is mostly for those publishing their own RSS feeds — but this is certainly a step in the right direction.

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blogs, RSS, technology, trends

The highs and lows of publishing contributor dependent websites

21 January 2026

Manuel Moreale writing about People and Blogs, where he features regular interviews with bloggers:

It sucks because, since day one, I tried to find a good balance between keeping the series running smoothly and not letting guests wait for months and months to get their interview published. But I’m at the point where I can no longer do that. More than a few times, I found myself with the queue completely empty while waiting for dozens of people to get back to me. Every time someone came through in the end, and the series kept marching on week after week, but let me tell you: it’s not fun.

For a few years, between 2005 and 2007, I published a website about the creative and artistic work and projects of Australians, called OnVoiceOver (Internet Archive link). The name was a geeky word play on OnMouseOver, an old JavaScript event handler.

But OnVoiceOver, or OVO as I’d call it, was not an interview series like People and Blogs. Interviews with well known web people were already common circa 2005, and I wanted to try a different approach. So instead of posting interviews with people, I wrote an article about their work.

OVO also sported an ISSN, or International Standard Serial Number, on account of its (intended) periodic publication schedule. I tried in vain to get an ISSN for disassociated, but was told blogs were not considered to be periodic publications. Oh, really?

OVO was (mostly) fun while it lasted. Some of the people I featured included Cameron Adams, who later co-found Canva, artist and writer Lang Leav, and artist Brad Eastman.

Long story short: I’d contact someone I wanted to profile (though sometimes people messaged me). After they agreed, I’d send them some questions, and use the answers, once received, to write the article. Once three articles were finished, I would then publish a new edition.

Like People and Blogs, OVO, despite the sole Australian focus, should have had sufficient fodder, content wise, to remain publishing indefinitely. After all, new and exciting ideas were coming along constantly. It’s not like there was nothing else to write about, after I posted the twenty-seventh, and final, article in August 2007.

But I was also in the situation where I was waiting on people, who had agreed to participate, some of whom I knew personally, to get back to me with their answers. On the other side of that, there were those who had returned answers, wondering when their feature would be posted.

I’d sometimes desperately trawl through news and forum posts of the likes of (erstwhile) Australian design portals, Australian Infront and Design is Kinky, to see if there was an idea I was able to quickly work with, so the next edition could go out. Perhaps my decision to post articles in groups of three was not so clever after all, and I should have gone with a single article format.

But I doubt that would have made much difference. I know everyone who participated was busy. They had jobs and careers to focus on. They had families to spend time with. When I’d follow up, I’d often receive messages to the effect of “oh yes, I keep saying to myself I must answer these questions as soon as possible”.

OVO quite likely had a less pronounced profile than People and Blogs, but it surprises me would-be participants are dragging their heels. A People and Blogs profile must be accompanied by a pleasing spike in traffic, and likely some new readers in the process.

In the end though, it wasn’t a few people not returning their answers to me that spelt the end of OVO. Migrating disassociated to WordPress, in mid 2007 was what did it. Somehow interest in the WordPress-ed version of disassociated skyrocketed, almost overnight, and visits increased ten-fold within a few months. This was, of course, the so-called golden-age of blogging.

My energy and focus was firmly there by that point. Eventually enough people returned answers allowing me to publish a final edition of OVO in August 2007, six months after the previous one. About two years later, OVO officially went into hiatus. The website remained online for quite a while, and in 2019 I finally relinquished OVO’s domain name.

Since my days of publishing OVO — and it did occur to me this was happening twenty years ago — I’m far more cautious about publishing what I call contributor dependent content. I try to do as much as possible here by myself, even though some of us like to think this is a collaborative medium.

I also seldom involve myself in other people’s projects, aware that my taking months to make a contribution, after saying I’d do so “in a few days”, is not helping matters.

But for the frustrations that come with operating People and Blogs, I remain hopeful the interviews will continue to be published for some long time to come yet.

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blogs, self publishing, trends

Markdown does not belong to John Gruber, it belongs to everyone

12 January 2026

Anil Dash:

The trillion-dollar AI industry’s system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format one guy made up for his blog and then bounced off of a 17-year-old kid before sharing it with the world for free. You’re welcome, Time Magazine’s people of the year, The Architects of AI. Their achievement is every bit as impressive as yours.

I’ve never used Markdown, created by John Gruber, aided by the late Aaron Swartz, in 2004, I still add the Markup included in my web writing either through copy and paste, or manually.

That’s the former web designer in me talking. If I want to add, say, bold formatting to some text, how hard is it to type out the <strong> tag, and </strong> to close it again?

Of course, I can see how much easier it would be to type **bold** using Markdown instead, if I wanted to apply bold formatting somewhere. But the real story is just how widely used the formatting tool has become since Gruber released it twenty-two years ago.

I don’t really mean to say “Markdown does not belong to John Gruber, it belongs to everyone”, but that seems to be what has happened.

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