Finding new blogs to read

A couple of weeks ago, I read a post by JRN titled “How I find interesting blogs” which was a response to a post from Barry’s post:

I appreciate personal site/blog directories–lots have been cropping up. I try to submit to them all, however…I’ve only received 22 hits from such sites this year. Is anyone else seeing notable traffic from these services?

I admit, even though my blog is on a lot of these directories, I do not analyze traffic so I have no clue if some people stumble on this blog using them. And to be honnest, I couldn’t care less as I’m not into trying to understand the traffic of my blog. I only care about writing what I want and publish it, and enjoying interactions with others (in any forms, would that be webmentions, emails or direct chat on matrix or IRC). Numbers from analytics are just a big lies and doesn’t mean anything really.

That being said, it raised the interesting question of how to find other blogs that I would want to add to my feed reader. I already talked about this in a long post about the 25th birthday of RSS, but might be good to extract that part in a dedicated post.

In summary, I have 4 ways of finding new blogs:

1. From bloggers reacting to other bloggers
2. New sites added in directories
3. Aggregator type of sites
4. Bloggers sharing bookmarks and links

Being lazy, let’s copy paste what I wrote in the post mentioned above about ways 2 to 4 (slightly updated):

Some website clubs provides RSS feeds for the newly added sites to their directory:

• A list of recently added sites from the Ooh Directory
• 250KB Club have an new website feed
• 512KB Club also have an RSS feed for new sites
• 1MB Club RSS Feed
• List of new sites on the searchmysite search engine (number of site added is low so it is easily manageable).

Edit: Other sources that I didn’t share but could be useful:

• The discover section of Robert’s “blog inspiration” post
• The blogroll.club website which provides an RSS feeds for all new posts from the blogs listed.

The feeds from these sites are in a specific category in my feed readers called “discovery” that is not displayed by default. Only when I have time I go to this category and open 5 or 10 sites and look around.

Some aggregators example:

• Closer the the IndieWeb, IndieSeek provides a manually curated lists of posts from and about the IndieWeb
• Still in the indieweb world, the indieweb news has an English feed and French feed (via granary) for article published to indieweb news
• The indieblog.page provides RSS feeds for receiving 5 random posts per day.
• The blogroll.org website has a planet as well. I don’t subscribe to it because there are too many posts per day on it for me.

This feeds are also in my “discovery” category as above.

Here are some websites sharing links / bookmarks, like my Bookmarks page:

• ShellSharks note feed
• drhayes links feed
• Jamie Tanna bookmarks feed
• grgml bookmarks feed
• Lars Christian links feed
• Chris McLeod bookmaks feed

This type of feeds are in a “bloggers shared” category, not visible by default either. But I usually go first to this category before looking at the discovery one.

Nothing special here, but some tips to find a cool new site from time to time :). Of course, the Fediverse is also a good way of finding new blog to read and enjoy.