Ooh.directory

by adrianhon • 4 years ago

988 151 4 years ago

More of this please!

This looks like a really cool project, excited to browse through over the holiday break. Just submitted my art blog (https://freezine.xyz), but realized I don't publish an RSS feed. Will have to address and resubmit.

InCityDreams• 4 years ago

Best on a desktop browser.

Why, oh why....? Stuck in hospital, so much free time free, so many restrictions, and yet so few - what am i missing, or likely to have missed, being on mobile?

peter_l_downs2• 4 years ago

Sorry to hear you're in hospital, I hope you get well soon. The warning is there because I don't design the site for mobile, plus there is content hidden around the site that is easiest to find by viewing source or otherwise exploring in a way that mobile browsers don't make easy.

pjc50• 4 years ago

.. https://freezine.xyz/1/high-bandwidth/index.html needs a strobe warning.

sirodoht• 4 years ago

That’s pretty awesome! I maintain something similar: https://collection.mataroa.blog/

rambambram7• 4 years ago

Wow, big list! I bookmarked it.

Ever considered to publish this list as an easily searchable and exportable OPML file?

perlpimp• 4 years ago

it would be helpful if there was some sort of rss aggregator functionality. Ie google reader that used to be.

yrds96• 4 years ago

This is the idea that I always had but never implemented. I'm glad my dream came true.

cactacea2• 4 years ago

Did someone just reinvent Yahoo as it existed in 1994?

saboot• 4 years ago

I hope so, it was useful then, useful now!

monkeynotes• 4 years ago

I don't think it's that simple. It was useful then because web discoverability was an unsolved problem, and web content was tiny compared to today. A directory sort of fit the need. As the web grew directories became bloated and hard to navigate, search became more useful.

This is more of a nostalgia or niche link list. It's not the same purpose as yahoo in the 90s.

ralmeida4381• 4 years ago

LOL, that was my first impression! Obviously the milenials doesn't know about yahoo.

But well... the problem is almost the same: too few info == too much info => No enough info to make decisions.

Mezzie• 4 years ago

Hey now, a couple of us remember! ;)

Yahoo is how baby me learned the word 'hierarchical'.

cercatrova• 4 years ago

Millennials? Or Gen Z?

The youngest Millennial is 26, so they probably knew at least a little when they were young about what Yahoo was.

cactacea2• 4 years ago

Sorry to break it to you but I'm a millennial lol

pavlov• 4 years ago

It's not a coincidence: there's a shadow of an exclamation point in the logo, and the color scheme hints towards Yahoo!'s trademark purple too.

aendruk• 4 years ago

And the name. Yahooh

axg11• 4 years ago

I like the aesthetic -- a modern warm Craigslist?

blowski2• 4 years ago

How on earth do you use a website without full screen parallax stock photos?

laputan_machine• 4 years ago

Very cool

robga2• 4 years ago

It reminds me of DMOZ ODP days.

Ohh.nostalgia

http://www.odp.org/homepage.php (archive)

zozbot2342• 4 years ago

DMOZ was and is freely licensed though. This one makes for a nice proof of concept, but there's no mention of availability or reusability for any of this data.

robga2• 4 years ago

DMOZ had an interesting license, as I recall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Directory_License

https://web.archive.org/web/20070813215202/http://www.dmoz.o...

"The Free Software Foundation describes the ODL as a non-free license"

But your point is a good one and well taken.

Minor49er2• 4 years ago

You'll love Curlie which was created by a number of DMOZ alumni

https://curlie.org/

adrianhon• 4 years ago

More context in this announcement post!

https://mastodon.social/@philgyford/109393682988861819

asicsp• 4 years ago

Reminds me of https://blogsurf.io/ which used to have a way to list recent blog posts (but couldn't find a way to do so now).

This one has categories and filtering options, nice! Random is good to have (see also https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random)

the-printer• 4 years ago

This is cool, shout out to all the directories and lists and aggregators.

unglaublich• 4 years ago

Humans aggregating what they think is useful for other humans. That is the internet of the past, and hopefully of the future.

rambambram7• 4 years ago

I can't agree more. It's the only way to stand up to the fakery and artificiality of algorithms. I try to make my software 'internet friendly'.

boplicity• 4 years ago

The combination of good categorization and high-quality curation make this a very interesting project.

Curation, combined with good categorization, is sorely needed in today's internet.

The solution of "search" (aka Google) just doesn't cut it if you want to discover the best publications in a topic area.

I hope this project takes off!

prox• 4 years ago

Yeah me too!

A nice addition would be having account, and being able to like it. Likes are not public, but instead combine to show you things other people liked as well. Since they are not public, hopefully that will discourage gaming it.

tiffanyh• 4 years ago

DMOZ

Remind me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ

LoganDark• 4 years ago

Instinctively typed "furry" into the search bar and got no results. High quality!

Tade0• 4 years ago

I have to say I enjoy the consistent sub 800ms load times.

snapcaster2• 4 years ago

Site is down :(

philgyford8• 4 years ago

Looks OK from here. What are you seeing?

(It's my site.)

ZeroGravitas• 4 years ago

Firefox gives me this error:

Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to ooh.directory. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR

    The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
    Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.

snapcaster2• 4 years ago

Just checked again, not working for me in chrome getting

This site can’t be reached

rchaud2• 4 years ago

Time is a flat circle, eh?

But all kidding aside, web directories should be much more powerful now than in the 90s. Websites have RSS, and directory websites should be able to automatically monitor things like uptime, and leverage RSS to preview a site's most recent post.

I've considered maintaining my own directory on my personal website (a one-way webring if you will), but always stopped because the sites I linked to either died, or were acquired and became something very different.

Minor49er2• 4 years ago

Regarding the lifetime of a site, it might be possible to submit requests to the Internet Archive or similar service whenever a site is added to a directory or a new post is found on it. That way too, it would be easier to see when a site is no longer active or when it turned into something else. Then, when it's deactivated, the web directory could just point to the archive first

mrtksn• 4 years ago

Time is a flat circle, eh?

I prefer Mark Twain's “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”

It's pretty obvious that we have come to a stagnant period of online content and there's a desire to move past the glamour of the Instagram and political fights on Twitter and optimised for ad revenue videos on Youtube but I don't think that the personal websites are coming back.

Those were cool because only specific type of people were able to build websites, then the code free services for sharing content came along and everybody got online presence but because the medium is the message we are kind of getting tired of the message. There seems to be a search for a new medium. The time for the next verse feels around the corner but I don't think we have found it just yet!

pvg• 4 years ago

I prefer Mark Twain's

That has its own history

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/

kachnuv_ocasek• 4 years ago

I prefer Slavoj Žižek’s “first time as a tragedy, second as a farce”.

account422• 4 years ago

It might just be observation bias but it seems to me that personal websites and blogs are coming back at least for the kinds of people that might have had one in the old web. Perhaps the trend won't wash over the whole web but having a subculture that is at least as large as the old web would be great, no?

nijave• 4 years ago

Well, we have awesome-* in GitHub now. Unfortunately RSS seems to still be hit-or-miss.

mypetocean• 4 years ago

Do you mind clarifying what you're referring to?

Semaphor2• 4 years ago

The issue is curation. Many awesome-* lists are just the kitchen sink, with no regard given to quality or stability.

r0fl• 4 years ago

Are there any scripts or wordpress plugins that can build out much better directories like you describe?

mitchdoogle2• 4 years ago

We have lots of curated lists popping up. Pretty soon someone will make a search engine to search all the lists.

bckr• 4 years ago

A searchable list of lists, or SLL, you might say?

d_cyper• 4 years ago

Got any examples? Would be interesting to see what's out there...

nine_k• 4 years ago

Why, a curated list of curated lists, of course.

I wonder how soon people will start to collaboratively train ML models for curation, by their acts if curation, much like spam filters are trained today.

AndrewStephens2• 4 years ago

More of this kind of thing, please. Any boost privately run blogs get is a welcome respite from the walled gardens of most social media.

I am just sad that my very unfocused blog doesn't really fit into any of their categories.

philgyford8• 4 years ago

There's always "Personal blogs", which is a large number of them.

AndrewStephens2• 4 years ago

I guess I do fit in somewhere, thanks.

rambambram7• 4 years ago

I like how you say on your site that you recently joined Mastodon, while your RSS feed works just fine and I see posts from 2006. ;)

bsnnkv• 4 years ago

This gave me a flashback to the final season of "Halt and Catch Fire", which I enjoyed a lot and recommend to anyone who has nostalgic feelings about computing and the internet in the 90s.

xeeeeeeeeeeenu2• 4 years ago

It seems that blogs can only be assigned to a single category. What about sites that are dedicated to more than one topic?

Nonetheless, this is a really cool project!

philgyford8• 4 years ago

As it says on the About page (https://ooh.directory/about/):

Some blogs appear in two or, occasionally, three categories. If it would take more than that, it ends up in the wonderland of Uncategorizable.

xeeeeeeeeeeenu2• 4 years ago

Thanks, I somehow missed that.

Since there's no way to select multiple categories in the "suggest" form, I take it you will manually amend the entry.

mellosouls• 4 years ago

Current curation rules:

https://ooh.directory/about/

- Every blog must have an RSS or Atom feed.

- Newsletters aren't included. Some sites are a blog and a newsletter, with identical content, but only those which mainly seem like a blog are included.

- Only blogs updated within the past year or so are added.

- Tumblrs are only included if they’re either focused on a specific topic or feature original content.

- Link blogs are only included if they include original commentary about each link.

- No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change, anti-vax ideas, etc.

RobertRoberts4• 4 years ago

- No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change, anti-vax ideas, etc.

I've heard of Twitter accounts getting banned because they mentioned some of these subjects in context of criticizing them. (which is the opposite result that would be expected)

How their curation process work is just as important as the rules themselves. If it's transparent and there's a person (not just an automated algorithm), is there also a recourse process for false positives or bad decision making?

rideontime• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure Phil is the curator.

slater• 4 years ago

No blogs promoting hate speech, denial of climate change, anti-vax ideas, etc.

Can we have this for the entire Internet, please? Thanks.

bradmcgo• 4 years ago

Definitely checking this out. I’d love to dive into some new blogs that offer in-depth, rich, original content.

cyrialize• 4 years ago

This reminds me of Neocities Districts! https://districts.neocities.org/

marcin32• 4 years ago

I am working on a retail directory: https://usashoplocator.com

kepano• 4 years ago

I love to see this. The death of blogs and RSS is highly exaggerated. The idea that Google "killed" blogs by killing Google Reader is a meme that is more destructive than Google's act in itself.

There are countless healthy and active blogs that you can read via RSS. There are great RSS reader apps.

For us technically-minded folks we need to keep being proactive about helping people read the web via RSS, improving discovery, and continually making RSS a first-class option on sites we build.

onetrickwolf• 4 years ago

I think people seem them as dead because a small percentage of internet users engage with them, but people forget that billions more people have access to the internet now. Even though it's a smaller percentage, the actual number of users has still gone up generally in my experience.

wpietri• 4 years ago

It sure didn't help, but I agree that Google Reader's death didn't kill blogs themselves; the decline has been pretty steady (Reader was killed in 2013): https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...

I also agree that RSS is still worth it. I am a happy subscriber to Newsblur: https://newsblur.com/

Indeed, the mess that is Twitter is giving me hope that we'll see a comeback of people self-hosting their content.

marban• 4 years ago

https://biztoc.com for instance.

stanislavb• 4 years ago

A shameless plug - I've built (recently) a simple yet powerful blog reader that could satisfy the needs of most people https://lenns.io. Why - it solves three primary issues with "traditional" readers:

1) You can follow websites (based on blog-post titles) when there isn't a proper RSS feed.

2) You have control on how many results per feed to have listed (e.g. not having your whole feed overloaded with the posts of one source)

3) You can assign priorities to Sources and categories so that you have control what's on top of your feed.

... if someone here bothers to give it a try, I'd be happy to receive any feedback.

p.s. there's a full OPML import/export support.

Semaphor2• 4 years ago

As most blogs and websites don't export the full content of their posts, that leads to a mixed reading experience. Quite often, you click the title of a post within a conventional reader only to see that there's nothing there apart from another link to the original post.

It’s the opposite for me. Almost every blog exports the full text. It used to be the other way, but that was in the GReader times.

The feed reader for people that want to be in control

I find that a questionable headline with no self-hosting option.

And it misses screenshots, I never sign up blind for anything.

leokennis• 4 years ago

This sounds interesting to me. Not because RSS is broken, I hardly ever encounter a site without a feed. But the "only one best article per site per day" sounds very smart.

However...do I get this by e-mail? In an app? Web interface? Maybe you could add some screenshots to your page :-)

insane_dreamer2• 4 years ago

Looks very nice. Unfortunately a lot of good bloggers now use paywalled substack (I don't blame them, I don't have time to write for free either), but this is a good resource for the few that are still gratis.

komali2• 4 years ago

Fun and utterly off topic: I'm on a boat for my partner's birthday, and this "FortiGuard" web security thing they use on their satellite internet that yesterday temporarily prevented us from watching porn together is today preventing me from viewing this cool site, on the grounds: "Newly Observed Domain."

Wondering who thought new domains should be blocked "just in case" and how they determine that. What percentage of requests the service receives are domains its never seen before? Assuming 90% or so are like, google, facebook, etc, but what if someone has a phone app that calls weird api domains? Actually that might explain some of the random weird failures I've been seeing on this trip...

WallyFunk• 4 years ago

Bookmarked. Will revisit.

Anyone else notice everything old is new again? Neocities[0], Marginalia Search[1], Project Gemini[2], etc

There's many others I'm forgetting, and new ones popup on Hackernews each week.

Is this just basic nostalgia, people wanting to recreate the dial-up days or even BBS days?

[0] https://neocities.org/

[1] https://www.marginalia.nu/

[2] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

BirAdam• 4 years ago

I believe that much of it is, indeed, basic nostalgia. Some of this, however, is also the recognition that not all of the early web was bad. Much of the early internet is viewed through rose-tinted glasses, but some of it was really good. For example, the ability to use a directory to find _exactly_ what you're looking for while search just feeds you two pages of paid result listings. Likewise, gopher made information available on even the most modest of machines (gemini trying to recreate something somewhat better) while modern web can spin up cooling fans on high-end laptop from 2019.

nibbleshifter• 4 years ago

I recently procured the highest specced out XPS 15 Dell offers, and some modern websites manage to spin the fans to an insane degree.

partyguy• 4 years ago

You're right! Even MySpace is back [0]

[0] https://spacehey.com/

marginalia_nu• 4 years ago

Is this just basic nostalgia, people wanting to recreate the dial-up days or even BBS days?

That's certainly not why I created my search engine. Old isn't an end, its a means to cut the bullshit.

Like I read a lot of old books, not because I'm nostalgic for yellowed paper, but because they consistently have much better signal to noise ratio than most of what you'll find on a screen or printed past 1990 or so. (When people bought books in physical book stores and weren't primarily ordering books online, books weren't judged by their page count as a proxy for how much content they contained, and thus had a lot less filler and anecdotes.)

If you gave me a method of selection that was as reliable for identifying good books among contemporary books, I'd probably read more contemporary books as a result.

sneak• 4 years ago

I was thinking of starting a web directory similar to this! I'm glad to see it.

Is there an OPML file that lists all of the blogs it knows about?

rambambram7• 4 years ago

Smart request! I recently started collecting blogs on https://www.heyhomepage.com/discover/ (almost nothing to see there right now) and I planned to publish the lists of links also as easily searchable and sharable OPML files.

philgyford8• 4 years ago

I will be adding various OPML files at some point.

jordanmorgan10• 4 years ago

Funny enough, I searched for "iOS" and my blog was the only result haha. Not sure how, or if someone else submitted it.

As an aside, I wish JSON feed would've taken off :-/ I know, I know, another standard - but it was a better one I think.

aliqot• 4 years ago

nice :) Now make it a webring with a snippet

piperswe• 4 years ago

I've been working on something sorta similar, just focused on general websites rather than just blogs: https://webjamboree.net/

rambambram7• 4 years ago

Nice! Bookmarked it.

I also recently started making some portal with curated links and feeds. I call it Discovery Portals. The very small beginning can be found at https://www.heyhomepage.com/discover/

n3storm• 4 years ago

No linux blogs

s30003• 4 years ago

This is the best thing for RSS in a long time. What I miss though for RSS streams is commenting. 'Nobody' reads the articles on link aggregators, (*e: just the comments). In a way, RSS is a link aggregator that limits its user base to the ones who read and don't comment.

I am wondering what will happen if RSS readers find a way to share comments on posts. Maybe ActivityPub makes that possible.

The only service of which I am aware that allows for comments on RSS is https://linklonk.com/ . Are there other approaches to bring comments to RSS streams?

Maybe ooh.directory can use ActivityPub to allow commenting and voting on the entries. Comments on HN are great to check for problems with an article. That should also be true for comments about entire blogs.

rambambram7• 4 years ago

What I miss though for RSS streams is commenting.
In a way, RSS is a link aggregator that limits its user base to the ones who read and don't comment.

I share this view. What do you think about a concept wherein a collection of followed feeds is presented in a timeline with the possibility to 'comment' with an email form? It will look like a regular comment textarea under some blogpost, but the commenting is done by email. The reaction isn't immediately visible under the blogpost (if at all) and therefor everything works humanly slow. But there's also no signup required, so it's more anonymous and openly accessible.

s30003• 4 years ago

a collection of followed feeds is presented in a timeline with the possibility to 'comment'

From my point of view, that's the future.

Using mail is dangerous because it is another protocol, and it still requires account management because nobody will post to arbitrary pages with their primary mail address. That said, mail still has the potential to become the standard for social networks.

Why should comments not be immediately visible? People can already write mails to authors. That's not what builds momentum. The interesting part is the interaction of the audience.

We can build social interaction that improves direct human interaction in the same way that cars improve human movement. I wouldn't focus on slowing it down but on speeding up the filtering so that it is easy to find the individually preferred audience among all possible reactions to an url. The difficult part is to maintain group identities and momentum when all comments are dissected and re-aggregated.

It's problematic to manage comments on the server of a blog post. This creates silos and echo chambers because it is difficult to find the comments of a user on other blogs and creators rarely allow their audience to create their own posts. Newspapers with their comment sections already offer that protocol. We have Facebook because newspapers missed out on coming together and offering the missing parts.

What is missing at Linklonk, apart from opening up to ActivityPub, is long-term conversations on posts. On aggregators like HN, there is an audience at the top comments. Hardly anybody writes comments on old posts. To make comments on off-momentum articles worthwhile, it would be necessary to have a notification function that is triggered not only by replies but also by new comments when they pass a threshold.

mawise2• 4 years ago

I am wondering what will happen if RSS readers find a way to share comments on posts

The IndieWeb community is focused on this with Social Readers[1] and Webmentions[2]. The core idea is your reader also ties into your own published feed, so you can make a comment right in your reader that publishes the comment to your own feed and sends a webmention to the original article so they know about it.

Barriers to entry are still kinda high (much like making a website 25 years ago) so any adoption should lead to a better signal/noise ratio. Unless it becomes popular enough for bots to start spamming the webmentions...

[1] https://indieweb.org/social_reader

[2] https://indieweb.org/Webmention

account422• 4 years ago

Webmention depends on the original source to link back to those comments for discovery though, right? I think perhaps a better approach would be a way to comment on any URL and see comments from other users (or communities) that you have subscribed to. That way the author of the content being discussed is not in a position to limit the discussion to what they approve of and you can discuss things that are not even opted into this system.

Ideally this system would also be integrated into browsers you you can see and write comments even when visiting a URL directly.

msephton3• 4 years ago

I at the end of each of my blog posts I include a link to the tweet where I announced the post. Works well for me. If Twitter dies I guess I'll have to swap them out at some point.

Alternatively, you could use something like a Discus embed for comments but I didn't want to have one more thing to manage.

xtracto• 4 years ago

Reminds me of an old site I used to frequent in the late 1990s:

https://web.archive.org/web/19991129033212/http://www.wannal...

Back then, it had a lot of very interesting info to learn about several subjects. I yearn for that internet.

dutchbrit• 4 years ago

Looks like the site currently doesn't know how to serve PHP/you download their source code for the homepage when visiting.

davedx• 4 years ago

Not OP's first rodeo. I was exploring his website and found on archive.org his first web directory, from 1998! https://web.archive.org/web/19980628182433/http://www.gyford...

colinprince• 4 years ago

Ooh.directory

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