The Indie Internet Index, another new directory of independent websites

Showing all posts about self publishing

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.

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?

A day in the life of a world without an internet

1 March 2026

Libraries, letters, street magazines, and face-to-face social networking.

This is how I saw a world without the internet sixteen years ago.

Most very serious.

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…

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.

RELATED CONTENT

blogs, self publishing, trends

The more personal websites there are, the better the web will be

6 January 2026

A website to destroy all websites, by Henry Desroches.

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

The website (to destroy all websites) in question is the personal website, because through personal websites, we build the web we want to have. If you only read one article about the present state of the web, make it this one.

Write more, about anything, on a personal website, not social media

2 January 2026

Fernando Borretti:

I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you’d write more! When I find someone whose writing I really connect with, I like to read everything they have written, or at least a tractable subset of their most interesting posts.

I’m the same.

There are probably quite a few people writing, or posting publicly, but much of that content ends up on social media, rather than a personal website or blog. Let’s do more to encourage independent online publishing on personal websites and blogs.

RELATED CONTENT

blogs, self publishing, social media

Are you a ‘small i’ indie web, or ‘capital I’ IndieWeb, publisher?

30 December 2025

Chris Shaw, writing at uncountable thoughts:

The IndieWeb is, as far as I can tell, a community of people who advocate certain digital principles and support each other in working towards those. The most famous principle is Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. There are a variety of initiatives such as the monthly blog carnival (which I have hosted in the past) and online/in-person meetups.

The indie web, on the other hand, is a (very) much larger universe of websites run by individuals who wish to express their independent creativity.

You can, as I am, be an indie web publisher, without being an IndieWeb publisher.

Many personal websites and blogs pre-date the IndieWeb movement, sometimes by well over a decade, but align with some IndieWeb principles. I am definitely in that category, and henceforth shall refer to myself as a ‘small i’ indie web publisher.

What happened to Problogger and Darren Rowse?

8 December 2025

A reader contacted me a few days after I mentioned blogging resource Problogger, and founder Darren Rowse, in a recent post. They were wondering if I knew anything about what’s happened at the site, or to Rowse himself, as no new content seems to have been posted since June 2024.

For those coming in late, Problogger was, or still is, one of the preeminent blogging resource sites, helping people who want to make money from writing online. The publication was launched by Melbourne based Australian blogger Rowse in 2004.

Despite being dated June 2024 though, some of the recent Problogger posts were actually much older. A few I looked at had — judging by the age of the comments — been written in 2008, and were re-posts. Evergreen content. But there was nothing — as far as I could see — indicating the site was taking either a temporary break, or ceasing operation all together.

It seems odd that a website with the profile of Problogger would suddenly fall silent, for no apparent reason. Of course long running single author blogs take breaks now and again, whether for personal or family reasons, or because the writer simply wants some time out.

Publishing content regularly is no small ask, as anyone who does so will tell you.

A look at the Problogger open-to-all Facebook page likewise revealed nothing. The last entry there, as of the time I type, is dated December 2024. The Twitter/X page however is a little more active, the last post I saw there (login may be required to view) was dated 18 November 2025.

But a Twitter/X post made on 15 April 2024 seems to answer the question of what’s become of both Problogger and Rowse: he’s now a church pastor, or at least is part time. As Rowse points out though, this is not exactly a new role, and was something he was doing prior to launching Problogger over twenty years ago. This might be him going back to his roots, perhaps.

I’m not sure what this means for the future of the Problogger website, given Rowse doesn’t appear to have said anything one way or the other as yet. There are still plenty of blogging related posts on his Twitter/X page, which might suggest Problogger will be revived sometime in the future. But until something official is said, Problogger readers will have to wait and see what happens.

On the plus side, even though posting seems to have paused, the website remains online, and content is still there to access. While it’s not quite my thing, it would still be unfortunate if twenty-plus years of information were to be taken offline.

As an aside, I also found out Rowse has been exploring how AI can be of use to religious leaders (Threads post). This might be of interest to people curious as to how religion and AI can intersect.

« older posts