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Awards, noisy blogs, images, and revived blogs

By Phil Gyford on

Four things are gathered in this one post…

First, I’m pleased to announce that ooh.directory is a nominee for the Tiny Awards, alongside 15 other little websites. If you’d like to vote for this site (listed as “Ooh! directory”) or any of the others, you can do so on the voting page before 20th July.

Second, there were some helpful responses following the previous post about blogs that post many, many times per day (thanks all!). Following that we’ve removed a dozen of the busiest blogs from the directory and we’ll see how that feels. Hopefully this makes the Recently updated blogs page more interesting and varied, and tilts the site slightly more towards “small interesting blogs” and away from “large ‘news’ websites”.

Third, every category page now has its own emoji-based images to use for prettier previews on the rare occasion that its URL is shared on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Each category’s RSS feed also uses those images, which means that some feed readers will show that next to the feed’s title. In my limited testing this is true for Feedbin but not NetNewsWire or Feedly which both continue to use the site’s Favicon.

Fourth, and finally, as well as the home page highlighting blogs celebrating a significant birthday today, if a blog publishes its first post in a long time, that will be celebrated on the home page too. (What “a long time” is may change, depending on how this goes.)

A screenshot of part of the home page with the headline "First post in almost a year!" The blog is "The lost output" and the post shown is titled "Running a 3D print catalogue with Van Dam" by Andy Piper.

It’s great if you have something to blog about regularly but it’s also fine if you rarely post on your blog. There are no blogging rules! In the latter case it seemed worth a tiny “ooh, look, nice!” when a blog wakes up again.

That’s all for now. As ever, feedback via Mastodon, Twitter or email is always appreciated.