Hello and welcome to the very first newsletter from ooh.directory.
I'm not sure what format this should take, how often it should go out, or how it should differ from the site's blog, or its Mastodon and Twitter accounts. Let's figure it out as we go. Thanks for being here.
This time around, keep reading for:
The site currently has 1,017 blogs available, having tipped into four figures at the weekend. Amazing.
It sounds grand to say I "launched" the site – I only tweeted and tooted about it – but as launches go it went well, with coverage on Hacker News, Boing Boing, Waxy.org, Web Curios, MetaFilter, ResearchBuzz, Clive Thompson, and Daring Fireball among others. We had over 200,000 unique visitors during the first week.
The site held up fine through all that, only having a few wobbles when I tried to move another website to the same server. This was too much and I had to pause the fetching of blog posts until the server gained more memory. I don't have a very good feel for that murky backend of websites but hopefully it will be OK for a while now.
Here are some interesting blogs I've come across while updating the site recently:
I honestly didn't anticipate getting many suggestions for blogs, and assumed I'd spend happy hours surfing the web finding interesting sites myself. But we now have 1,449 blogs in the pool of suggestions!
I'm publishing them slowly – up to 20 or so per day – because I want to give anyone visiting the site frequently, or following the "Recently added blogs" feed, a chance to glance at them. It also takes some time to review each one, check that it updated recently, decide on a category, find a description, etc.
I also want to ensure that the site, and the front page, contains a good mixture of blogs. A large proportion of the suggested blogs are about technology or writing code. Which is fine – I blog about code myself sometimes – but if I published suggestions in the order they were received it would be monotonous. So if you've suggested a blog, be patient. Very patient if it's about computers.
When making and populating ooh.directory I didn't give much thought to the languages blogs were written in. I knew I was only adding English-language blogs, and that a future problem was "What do we do about other languages?" but I didn't worry about it too much.
Now that people from around the world are visiting the site and submitting blogs I am thinking about it. But I'm not sure what to do. Here's some thinking out loud:
No need to volunteer to help at this stage, but I'm open to any ideas.
Bonus:
Can you guess the most popular day of the week to start a blog?
I've kept a record of when most blogs' first post was published, so we'll be able to see which day is most popular.
Don't send me your guess, but wait until next time to see if you're right…
That's it from me. I'll probably be back with more bloggy stuff in a month or so.
Phil Gyford