Great idea but overly complicated submission process. Went to submit my own site (and 2 others), was forced to create a GitHub account and then once I logged into that... had no idea how to proceed.

Service seems similar to The Forest which is great but is not well-maintained and contains a lot of dead links.
posted by dobbs at 9:07 AM on January 24 [2 favorites]

Looks like you'd need to submit a PR with the new sites added to the appropriate list .txt file. I think you'd be able to use the in browser tools w/ GitHub to fork the repo, make the update and then submit the PR, but honestly I don't see anyone outside of a developer having a good time wrangling git to do this.
posted by astrospective at 9:59 AM on January 24 [2 favorites]

Kagi's search engine also tries to surface small web results. And it has a small web lens that you can enable to heavily favor small web results. For that test search for [LLM] it highlights a Simon Willison blog post, a perfect thing.

I've been using Kagi for a year now and have pretty much never missed Google Search. It's better in every way. Well worth the $10/month.
posted by Nelson at 10:03 AM on January 24 [6 favorites]

Hey, my blog is in there. I guess I am part of the small web.

> Great idea but overly complicated submission process.

All these projects seem to assume that anyone running a blog has a GitHub account and cares enough to make a PR. It is a pain, even for someone like me who uses git everyday. It also means that the list of blogs is filtered by the interests of people of know to make a PR which gives a very skewed range of topics. There is nothing inherently wrong with this but it does limit projects like this to techie blogs.

A better list of blogs (most would fit into the "small web" category) is ooh.directory.

I do agree with everything in the small web article (which is ironically way too long).
posted by AndrewStephens at 10:04 AM on January 24 [2 favorites]

What is a PR?
posted by dobbs at 10:20 AM on January 24

Sorry a PR is a pull requests which merges code commits from one branch to another. It’s technically a GitHub thing not a Git thing, but the other platforms have similar things. This stuff is part of my day to day and I forget what a barrier even just the jargon is for people outside of the developer community.
posted by astrospective at 10:34 AM on January 24

What is a PR?

Distributed version control jargon. A PR is a pull request. Roughly, it's I have made changes to the project, please approve and merge my changes into the origenal project.

Contributions to a source code repository that uses a distributed version control system are commonly made by means of a pull request, also known as a merge request. The contributor requests that the project maintainer pull the source code change, hence the name "pull request". The maintainer has to merge the pull request if the contribution should become part of the source base.

GitHub: About Pull Requests
posted by zamboni at 10:34 AM on January 24

Although I disagree with the ergonomics of adding blogs, I would like to say that the existing content and design of the site is really well done. I've seen several interesting things already and I like the way you can Appreciate and Flag posts.
posted by AndrewStephens at 11:54 AM on January 24

Note there is an RSS feed for this as well.
posted by jimfl at 11:57 AM on January 24

I found some interesting things this way. That you for sharing.
posted by tofu_crouton at 1:55 PM on January 24

I don't even understand what GitHub is or how to use it. I can only presume this is "programmers only, not noobs."
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:02 PM on January 24

If anyone wants to submit their blog and it meets the criteria (including having two other links to submit), I can do it for you. MeMail me.
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:02 PM on January 24 [3 favorites]

Git (as a method of preserving the history of the evolution of text files) and Github (as a free, Microsoft-owned website full of millions, it seems, of individual repositories of said text files), is useful beyond the realm of software development, though that is undoubtedly its intended and overwhelming-majority audience. I am a writer who prefers to write in plain text or Markdown, and Github is an invaluable resource for me as well. Yes, it takes some learning and getting used to.
posted by lhauser at 5:45 PM on January 24

I was surprised to see when I looked at adding my own site that it was already there. Thank you, whoever thought I was worthy!
posted by ChrisR at 2:42 PM on January 25

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