Finding a new blog to read is one of my favourite things to do online. It genuinely brings me joy. Right now I have 230 sites that I follow in my RSS reader, Miniflux.

If I ever want to spend some time reading, I'll usually open Miniflux over my Mastodon client, Moshidon. There's no likes, boosts, hashtags etc. just interesting people sharing interesting opinions.

It's lovely.

So how do I discover these blogs? There's many ways to do it, but here's some that I've found most successful, ranked from most useful, to least.

1. Personal recommendations

When someone I already enjoy reading links to a post from another blogger, either just to share their posts, or to add their own commentary to the conversation.

This (to me at least) is the most useful way to discover new blogs to read. It's the entire premise of the Indieweb, so if you own a blog, please make sure you're linking to other blogs in your posts. 🙃

2. Aggregators

There are a number of great small/indie web aggregators out there, and there seems to be new ones popping up all the time. Here's a list of some of my favourites:

• Bear Blog Discover
• Blogosphere
• Blogroll
• Bubbles
• Kagi Small Web
• PowRSS

I tend to use these as a kind of extended RSS reader. So if I'm up to date on my RSS feeds, I'll use these as a way to continue hunting for new people to follow.

Truth is, I actually spend more time on these sites than I do on the fediverse. Speaking of which...

3. Social media

There's lots of cool people on the fediverse, and many of them have blogs. Even those who don't blog will regularly share links to posts they've enjoyed.

I also nose at hashtags of the topics that interest me, rather than just the timeline of people I follow.

So remember to add hashtags to your posts - they're a great way to aid discovery. 👍🏻

4. Natural discovery

This last bucket is just everything else; where I naturally find my way to a blog while surfing the net.

I've discovered some great blogs this way, but it's becoming harder and harder to find indie blogs this way, as discoverability on the web has been overtaken by AI summaries and SEO. 😏

It's still possible though.

Final thoughts

There's plenty of interesting people out there, creating great posts for us all to enjoy. The indie web is thriving, and if you're not taking advantage of it, you're missing out!

Why not take a look at a couple of the sites I've listed above and see what you discover? It's a tonne of fun.

Regular readers will know that I've been on quite the CMS journey over the years. WordPress, Grav, Jekyll, Kirby, my own little Hyde thing, and now Pure Blog. I won't bore you with the full history again, but the short version is: I kept chasing just the right amount of power and simplicity, and I think Pure Blog might actually be it.

But there was one nagging thing. I have a books page that's powered by a YAML data file, which creates a running list of everything I've read with ratings, summaries, and the occasional opinion. It worked great, but editing it meant cracking open a YAML file in my editor and being very careful not to mess up the indentation. Not ideal.

So I decided to build a proper admin UI for it. And in doing so, I've confirmed that Pure Blog is exactly what I wanted it to be - flexible and hackable.

The book editor

I added a new Books tab to the admin content page, and a dedicated edit-book.php editor page. It's got all the fields I need - title, author, genre, dates, a star rating dropdown, and a Goodreads URL. I also added CodeMirror editors for the summary and opinion fields, so I have all the markdown goodness they offer in the post and page editors.

The key thing is that none of this touched the Pure Blog core. Not a single line.

My new book list in Pure Blog

A book being edited

How it actually works

Pure Blog has a few mechanisms that make this kind of thing surprisingly clean:

content/functions.php is auto-loaded after core, so any custom functions I define there are available everywhere — including in admin pages. I put my save_books_yaml() function here, which takes the books data and writes it back to the books.yml data file, then clears the cache — exactly like saving a normal post does. Again, zero core changes.

config/update-ignore is the escape hatch for when I do need to override a core file. I added both admin/content.php (where I added the Books tab) and admin/edit-book.php (the new editor) to the ignore list, so future Pure Blog updates won't mess with them. It's a simple text file, one path per line. Patch what you need, ignore it, and move on.

content/includes/ is where it gets a bit SSG-ish. The books page is powered by content/includes/books.php — a PHP file that loads the YAML, sorts it by read date, and renders the whole page. It's essentially a template, not unlike a Liquid or Nunjucks layout in Jekyll or Eleventy. Same idea for the books RSS feed.

Using a YAML data file for books made more sense to me, rather than markdown files like a post or a page, as it's all metadata really. There's no real "content" for these entries.

Put those three things together and you've got something pretty nifty. A customisable admin UI, safe core patching, and template-driven data pages — all without a plugin system or any framework magic.

Bloody. Brilliant.

Why this matters to me

I spent years chasing the perfect CMS, and a big part of what I was looking for was this. The ability to build exactly what I need without having to fight the platform, or fork it, or bolt on a load of plugins.

With Kirby, I could do this kind of thing, but the learning curve was steep and the blueprint system took me ages to get my head around. With Jekyll/Hyde, I had the SSG flexibility, but no web-based CMS I could login to and create content - I needed my laptop. Pure Blog sits in a really nice middle ground — it's got a proper admin interface out of the box, but it gets out of the way when you want to extend it.

I'm chuffed with how the book editor turned out. It's a small thing, but it's exactly what I wanted, and the fact that it all lives outside of core means I can update Pure Blog without worrying about losing any of it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some books to log. 📚