ooh.directory

I’ve just opened the doors on a new project I’ve been working on, ooh.directory, a collection of hundreds of blogs, to help people find good blogs that interest them.

A screenshot of the front page. It has a pale pink background, and lists a dozen top-level categories, like 'Arts and media', 'Computers, internet, tech', each with a jolly red emoji icon. Beneath we see the start of a list of 'Recently added blogs'.

If you’ve been reading my weeknotes, this is the site I’ve been referring to as $new_project until now.

You can read more about the site on the, er, About page and the first post on its own blog, so I won’t repeat all that here.

Apart from the recent frustrations with writing my own code to fetch all the feeds, which delayed me launching for a couple of weeks, I’ve really enjoyed working on this. For a long time I thought, “I honestly don’t mind if I never show this to anyone; it’s been a very pleasant way to spend my time, tinkering away on this with no pressure.” But, obviously, here it is.

I’m sure I’ll mention it again, but if you want the latest updates on the site, read its blog, follow it on Mastodon or Twitter, or subscribe to its email newsletter (a new experiment for me).

5 comments

Hugh Garry at 2022-11-24 07:04 #

Phil. Thanks for putting such a wonderful thing into the world.
Tom P at 2022-11-24 09:28 #

Phil, I love this. I've had a half formed dream of modern a site like this for a while so it's fantastic to see it made real. Particularly love the use of the Noto emoji for the category icons!
Richard Carter at 2022-11-24 13:44 #

Exactly what I’ve been wishing existed! Thanks.
Tod Robbins at 2022-12-20 23:25 #

Phil! This is lovely. Also, did you design the adorable Mastodon and Twitter icons? I especially enjoyed that visual touch.
Phil Gyford at 2022-12-21 06:59 #

Thanks Tod! All of the icons are from the free Noto Emoji font. It's all very nice but I was pleased they had a good bird and mastodon!