Brad Enslen

It occurred to me that I have not been using or keeping up on the best of the Slo-web* search engines and needed to do something about that.   Since I don't use these every day I decided to just make a Speed Dial with these engines on it.**  This should help my work/search flow.***

Marginalia Search - for text heavy web pages which gets rid of commercial.  Crawls the web and has built a small index.  Very interesting results.

Wiby.me -  The index has grown quite a bit!  Mainly indexes static HTML sites.  Just keep clicking for more pages of SERPs because there is good stuff deeper.  This search engine crawls sites submitted by humans but does not crawl the web.

Searchmysite.net -  small index of non-commercial pages.  Some good stuff here.

Indieseek.xyz - okay so this is my directory not a search engine but I use it daily and I need a link it in with those above.

Right Dao -  This really isn't a slo-web search engine.  It's really a growing general search engine but I've been neglecting it so it's on this list so I'll use it more.

I recommend trying these search engines.  They are not intended to replace Google they are intended to find the non-commercial sites that get drowned out in Google.

Foot Notes:

* Slow-web aka Retro web, Yesterweb, Web Revival.

** Speed Dial is standard on Vivaldi Browser.  It has become sort of a generic term.  Other browsers have copied it or there may be an extension available for your browser that adds it.

*** Mojeek remains my default search engine.

Interesting video, The Early Internet is Breaking, about what has been lost from Web 1.0 and attempts to catalog the Web as it keeps evolving. About 9 min.  I like how they draw out lessons to be learned from the 1990's web of personal homepages.

Hat Tip:  Chris Hannah via Kev Quirk on Mastodon.

So I'm dealing with my tendency for blog proliferation again.  I thought about starting two new semi-private or private blogs.

1. A themed blog for practicing my fiction writing skills or world building or both.  I don't want to syndicate this one anywhere.  I'm not sure about blocking search engine crawlers probably yes.  If I make it open to anyone who stumbles upon it I would want comments on.

2. I thought about a blog that is just for musings and notes mainly my thoughts/plans for my other online websites.  I'd at least start with this as private.

Neither one of these are going to ever become popular so they both could be hosted on a subdomain somewhere.

The age old problem is it's easy to start a blog but can you sustain it?  Will I spread myself too thin?

When I get this itch, my solution is to procrastinate like I pro.  Doing a self-hosted Wordpress install seems like way overkill so I started researching blogging hosts, feature sets, costs.  Also trying to figure out if both should be on the same host or split up. 

Conclusions

After looking at about 100 blog platforms *pounds head against wall* the sad truth is Blogger.com has just about everything I want and need for at least one of these blogs.  But I don't like or trust Google, Blogger's owner, because I think they are dangerous.  

Wordpress.com would have been my first choice but they now have a new block editor which I don't want.  For these projects I just want to write, I don't want to have to fight the editor.  

Micro.blog has two major hurdles for me: 1. I'm not on an Apple device, so long form writing is either with their web UI or nothing.  I'm experimenting with Quill so that may be a partial work around.  2. No public comment capability on posts.  That's a problem for me.  Micro.blog has added some great features over the years but these two remain sticking points.  I also like the community but these blogs are loners, not intended to be part of a community.

Write.as looks good but I still have not confirmed if they have comments on their Pro hosting plan.

Bear Blog - has potential but is not quite there feature-wise.

Mataroa Blog - is close. No pages feature though. I give them an award for having the best no nonsense feature list right on their front page.  Other blog hosts ought to take note.

I'm hoping that if I procrastinate long enough maybe this urge to start new blogs will just go away.  It's worked before, but not always.  

Disregard this is a test posting from [Quill](https://quill.p3k.io/) to Micro.blog

Browser spell check works! Yea! That is a major Thing.

Markdown test:  *italics*  **bold**

If this works it solves a big blockage for me with the Micro.blog web editor not having spell check. Because 1. I'm Mr. Typo, 2. I'm a bad speller 

Downside of Quill is you have to be online.

Workaround, if not online or need to save for later, could be some sort of text editor.