- simple: not blatantly self-promoting, focuses on a topic, discusses that topic, and the post terminates cleanly without discussing too many other distracting things.
- clean: clean design, does not hurt the eye, does not have ads, does not try to get me to click on other posts and readable both on desktop and mobile.
- off-beat: not one of the mainstream blogs like TechCrunch, Wired, etc., not one of the famous blogs like Paul Graham's, Norvig's, etc., one of the less known ones that has hidden gems one can learn something from.
- self-hosted: not hosted on a popular platform like medium, blogspot, wordpress, etc. hosted by the blog author on their own, could be hosted on GitHub pages and similar places. As long as the author is in full control of the pages, content, layout, etc. that's good enough.
My reason for asking this is twofold: I will get some good blogs to follow. I will get some inspiration to start my own blog. When I start my own blog, I would like to learn how to keep the pages simple and clean from others who have been blogging like this for sometime.
I miss the time we found and shared random gems are greatness through blog rolls.
Bring back the webrings! ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21328084 )
Some time ago wordpress took the 'blogroll' post type out of core completely, and still today there are people asking for an embedded 'nofollow' tag adder in the core editor - and still it hasn't been done, though it's available in a plugin.
Unforseen side effects perhaps, adds to silencing / hiding the web that would otherwise be more freely shared.
Which is one of the things have led to RSS being less of a sought after thing. imho.
I manage 5+ websites, all based on custom php cms.