One month on

It’s been one month since the site launched, so here’s an update.

We’ve gone from 851 blogs live on the site to 1188, an increase of nearly 40%. I’ve been publishing around 15 blogs most days, which is enough to refresh the list on the front page, and not too many to swamp anyone following the RSS feed.

The pool of suggestions now contains 1433 blogs. After the initial rush, new suggestions are coming in at a similar rate to me publishing them.

Obviously, even if no new suggestions were made, it would take a long time for me to work through the pool. I’m also trying to keep each day’s batch of published blogs pretty diverse (in terms of topics covered). This means that if you’re waiting for your blog about programming, or another computer-related field, to appear you may have a very long wait. There were many, many such blogs suggested, especially in the first couple of days (Hi, Hacker News!), and I’m only publishing two or three of those each day. And only then if they’ve been updated fairly recently.

As new blogs are added, some categories become unwieldy. I’m reviewing them as I go so there will be gradual refining and re-organising over time. Recent new categories include Beer and Woodworking.

I have a lot of new features I’d like to add to the site but haven’t had a chance yet because I’ve been distracted by housekeeping on one of my own blogs – The Diary of Samuel Pepys – which is starting its third decade-long reading on 1st January. I should have more time available to improve ooh.directory over coming months.

I’m going to have a break over the final week of the year so there probably won’t be any new blogs added before 2023. Happy blogging (or blog reading)!