I built a new website. It’s happiest when you leave.
I was over on Bluesky yesterday with the rest of the Wokerati (it's where we gather to fail to foment the glorious revolution). My friend Peter Anderson was gently lamenting that The Thing That Is Inescapable And Must Be Spoken About has made certain types of freelance writing uneconomic at best, and potentially entirely untenable.
Now, I am nothing if not supportive of our brethren who toil in the content mines, so I offered a solution.
I'm not even kidding. Let's bring back blogrings.
If you're old enough to remember the cgi-bin days of the early web, you'll remember webrings and blogrings. If you weren't, then I guess I need to describe them. Folks would have a widget on their site displaying links to other websites that were generally good quality internet. It seems bonkers now in these days of 10x s-tier engage-alytics, but we used to be really quite chuffed when you clicked a link and left our sites.
Look at X now, (and the weirdo Facebook-now-with-added-bluetooth hellscape that is LinkedIn) doing their level best to make sure you're forever scrolling, finding nothing good, but somewhere a piece of code silently logs that you didn't find something for even longer today than you spent not finding something yesterday and that means somewhere a line went up. Bonuses for some, layoffs and womp-womp-wooooomp trombone sounds for others.
It's icky, and I don't like it. Maybe you feel the same way. Perhaps you want to RETVRN to the days of Good Internetting.
Turns out the best domain on Al Gore's Internet — goodinternetting.com — is somehow available for purchase. Well, it was. I own it now and I've put a fun little site on there that you can visit, add to your favourites bar, or if you're feeling like a fancy-pants maybe set it as your browser's start page.
I've seeded it with the rss feeds of about 25 or so websites, blogs, and newsletters. Small web stuff for the most part but there's some Big Internet Personalities on there as well. The list is growing, and the criteria for entry is a highly secret algorithm (not really — it's just websites that I rate highly and this is my thing so I get to make the rules).
When you go to goodinternetting.com, it fetches the 10 most recent posts from across all those websites and presents you a list of links to click. No summaries, no descriptions. Just the headline. Don't see anything that takes your fancy? Mash the ugly orange button and we'll immediately zap you to a mystery page from one of those websites! Maybe you'll like what you see when the page loads. Or not. There are no guarantees in life and the website is free so I don't see why you're complaining.
There's no tracking, no google analytics, GTM, whatever. This website wants nothing from you at all, apart from that you click a link and leave. As your friend, I'm asking you to visit goodinternetting.com, click a link, and make a special little website happy. Will you do that? Are you doing that right away?
There's only one metric, and it's displayed on the site. I count how many times people have clicked a link and left to go somewhere else. The more people that leave, the better.🫡
Like the idea behind goodinternetting.com? Want to embed it on your website and send some traffic other people's way? You can get amongst it easily. Go to the site, copy the script, and paste it wherever your website robot lets you put html. It's that simple. Want to see it in action? ronbronson.design has put it on his site and it looks hella swish.