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A page for every blog

By Phil Gyford on

A couple of months ago regular visitors might have noticed a little change to the site – every blog now has its own page. Now that this is working smoothly, and seasonal holidays are out of the way, here’s the blog post about that change.

Every blog listed on the site – currently 2,117 of them – now has its own page on ooh.directory, collecting all the data we have about it, including:

  • The category/ies it’s in
  • Favicon or social sharing image
  • Description (a quote from the blog itself)
  • Author(s)
  • Country in which it’s based
  • Rough frequency of posting
  • Date of its first post
  • RSS/Atom feed link
  • A chart of how often it posts
  • Titles and starts of its most recent posts
  • Times when its feed was last fetched and how that went

Here’s a picture of one for posterity:

A screenshot of a page about The Pen Addict blog

Here are a few others to look at:

These pages are linked to from the “More info” text in all listings of blogs. This meant that some of the info that used to only exist in those listings – such as categories and first post date – could be removed to make them simpler and less cluttered. This kind of page will also be a useful place for other future things about each blog to live.

A couple of other improvements since we last wrote, too long ago:

The site search now lists any categories matching the search term, in case you’re searching for a topic. It also works better if you’re searching for part of a URL, whereas previously it might not return any results.

The cute emoji we use around the site should display more consistently than they were, depending on which OS and browser you’re using. We noticed that Safari and, especially, Firefox, were showing the emoji as regular ones, instead of the fun Noto Emoji font. This is some kind of bug with the browsers and/or macOS. As part of a solution we now use our own custom version of the font, which happens to display more consistenly, with the bonus that we’re no longer relying on Google’s font hosting. Firefox still isn’t working perfectly but I think that’s out of our hands.

Thanks for reading. We hope your blog reading, and maybe writing too, is already off to a good start in 2024.