What is this place?
I've been reading blogs for a decade and an ominously increasing pile of change, and it didn't take long for me to experience that first wonderful moment of barely remembering a post and spending hours searching for it. I started using a few third party services, notes apps, text files, etc. to try and keep track, but those are just lists (if I can find them). I made a grand effort to collate all of the posts I could still find that I have referenced before on this archive's previous incarnation but that too was insufficient for my needs.
Blogs and posts get lost all the time, and I wanted to make it easier for me to collect and paw through my favorites. At the same time, after making a few lists I found it convenient when trying to onboard someone into the blogaspora or the hobby in general to be able to open my blogaphorical trenchcoat and show them the list, and a long barely annotated list is difficult for anyone to dive through. Worse, as forums grow less popular and sites like discord take over (poorly) some of their role, lists explode and disappear even faster. Neocities is a static site, if I were to disappear and never update this again all the links here and all the code that runs it will remain so long as it is findable in the Wayback Machine.
There are some plans I have to expand this archive and use it as an opportunity to display certain themes and trends, but that's far down the line and something I'd love to work with guest curators on. As of its initial publishing, this archive is simply a conversion of a poorly kept series of lists I've kept from ~2009-2026 (this time period confuses and alarms me now that I write it). That all in mind, it's a very limited view of the huge diversity in the hobby.
I don't intend for this place to ever function as a search engine for all posts in the blogaspora, but instead as a gateway to blogs and posts I've found value in and want remembered. There are more blogs than ever before, more posts to read than when I came into the hobby, may the blogaspora ever continue to grow. Discoverability is hard, linkrot is pervasive, and capturing even a section of posts and blogs is a challenge. This curated archive is my imperfect attempt to capture, remember, and point to my favorites and show guests to them.
- Dungeon Crab, 2026
Linkrot is the phenomenon where hyperlinks to websites cease to function, either due to architectural changes on the webhost end, the decay of the service, intentional deletion by the author, etc. Blogs rot and bloom in cycles, pages go down and never return as their authors move on. This is the way of things. Look around, how many blogging sites are we at now? Is the nature of the blogger to be a hermit crab and shift shells from time to time (writing about myself)? Services go up, go down, people change their minds, and all I want is to read their words, so I aim to preserve them where prudent.
Preservation here is defying the nature of decay. Each post entered into this archive has been verified to have been archived to the Wayback Machine (so long as it continues to function). If you find a dead link then the Wayback Machine should be your first stop. If you have a working URL for something that has moved, you are welcome to send it along.
I've tried to make a good faith attempt to comment where possible in the code that runs this archive so that someone else can take it wholecloth and use it for their own nefarious archival purposes. The second best piece of artistic advice I've seen is to steal ideas and twist them to your own needs. There's no lock and key or licensing here, the door is open for anyone who wants to take what they can and run. Grab the pages listed in the navbar and the javascript file and you're good to go.
If any record here is revealed to have been made using a Large Language Model it will be killed with hammers and left for the gulls.