Pharyngula and Slacktivist are ancient and still running. I’ve been reading both since I graduated high school/had a Google Reader feed with 1k+ blogs. Both very different: Pharyngula is a ran by an atheist biology professor, while slacktivist is a Baptist laid off journalist who was/is working retail.
The big thing with these blogs in the heyday of blogging - these comment sections were spectacular. Slacktivist drew me in because he did page-by-page analysis of the Left Behind series, and the commenters would write often high effort, good fan-fiction in response to whatever passage. On Pharyngula, you could see multiple actual scientists rip a stray creationist wandering in to shreds.
There’s just something different about old school blog culture versus “link aggregators” - nothing like the feeling of a “free Friday thread.”
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/
Was (and still is) one of the definitive sources for software dev information
Also the older posts in https://blog.codinghorror.com/ - the newer stuff is OK but not as good.
Jeff Atwood founded(?) Stack Overflow with Spolsky’s help.
First thing that popped into my head was this:
https://thesneeze.com/category/front-page/sdei/
I don’t remember anything about the rest of the blog, but the Steve, Don’t Eat It series was a treasure.
Uwe Hermann’s music recommendations blog.
Around 2010, it contained ~weekly Creative Commons song recommendations from Uwe(a Debian Developer)
- Also the Libre Music Wiki was excellent, at about the same time.
The funniest thing about Maddox’s website is that he’s still posting, and the site is almost entirely unchanged since I first saw it approximately 2 decades ago
That’s cool maddox kept going until 2023
i-mockery
Rog was on newgrounds, he tried to do a horror film stream with his then wife, did really good reporting on stuff from comicon, accepted user submissions, had his friends contribute…
His wife died. The blog stopped.
Hmm there’s different types of blogs like cooking, travel, etc. Is there a certain type you are looking for?
I don’t actively follow blogs but an author I like is John Scalzi and he has a very active blog.
MrMoneyMustache I have known of because I aspire to FIRE :)
I suppose I’m leaving the question open-ended on purpose, but really anything that was around and memorably good in the era when blogs ruled the day (speaking very broadly here, late 1990s-early 2010s).
If it still exists and is updating, that’s great! But I’m fascinated by internet history and the digital past we build and quickly forget, so I’m really interested in looking back at entries from that era. Thanks!
Now you’ve got me thinking and I remember concepts and random posts but I can’t think of a single name…
fediverse is the new blogosphere. why tf would i want to read an article that i can’t even comment on?
I think you’re welcome to link anything here and comment on it to your liking, even if the comment section on the original website is no longer available.
As for why you might read it: It’s for the same reason we read old books, magazines, journals, and letters, I would hope.
For the same reason libraries and archives exist, for as long as they do.
