Small and independent blogs are always full of surprises. The more blogs I stumble upon, the more genuinely surprised I am by the things people do with their blogs. It seemed like a good idea to summarize highlights here. I hope it might inspire non-bloggers to blog and bloggers to tinker more with their site---because obviously the tinkering never ends!
I randomly selected blogs for each _thing_. There are ample other sites that use that particular feature, but I had to start somewhere. Some blogs appear multiple times, probably making them even funkier! This list is incomplete, I'll try to periodically update it as I encounter more cool stuff. Enjoy!
- Publish reviews of books/music/... in a cool sortable grid: [Chris Burnell's Music](https://chrisburnell.com/music/)
- Hack together your own `last.fm` to scrobble music to your own site: [Jan Boddez' Owning My Scrobbles](https://jan.boddez.net/articles/owning-my-scrobbles)
- Sync your laptop battery, local weather, and current location with your site: [Aaron Parecki's homepage](https://aaronparecki.com/)
- Publicly display global website statistics: [Luke Harris' stats page](https://www.lkhrs.com/stats/)
- More stats: game playtime, AWStats server data: [Roy Tang's stats](https://roytang.net/page/stats/awstats/)
- Create and regularly update a "uses" page: [Ru Singh' uses page](https://rusingh.com/uses/)
- Create and regularly update a "now" page: [Derek Sivers' the /now page movement](https://sive.rs/nowff)
- Auto-import game metadata from How Long To Beat and others: [Jefklak's Codex games page](https://jefklakscodex.com/games/)
- Use your own site to publish checkins instead of Foursquare: [Henrique Dias' checkins](https://hacdias.com/checkins)
- Regularly publish week reviews or link bundles: [Stefan Imhoff's Link Bundle #15](https://www.stefanimhoff.de/links/bundle-15/)
- Have an "on this day" page that displays posts from previous years: [Frank Meeuwsen's on this day archive](https://diggingthedigital.com/onthisday/)
- Group multiple posts into series: [Amos' long-form series](https://fasterthanli.me/series)
- Group multiple posts into research questions: [Emmanuel Quartey's questions section](https://www.quartey.com/questions)
- Syndicate the HTTP blog to a Gemini capsule: [Brain Baking Gemini](/post/2021/04/using-hugo-to-launch-a-gemini-capsule/) (defunct)
- Implement a simple client-site search using lunr.js: [Brain Baking archives]( /archives/)
- Show articles from others blogs you read below your own articles: [an article from Drew DeVault](https://drewdevault.com/2022/04/15/Status-update-April-2022.html)
- Use a public inbox as a commenting system: [an article from Drew DeVault](https://drewdevault.com/2022/04/15/Status-update-April-2022.html)
- Implement reaction buttons for each post: [Jan-Lukas Else's thoughts on reactions](https://jlelse.blog/posts/goblog-reactions)
- Have a guestbook page where people can send Webmentions to to sign it: [Ana Rodrigues' guestbook](https://ohhelloana.blog/guestbook/)
- Collaborative pixel-art that gets saved every five minutes: [Aaron Parecki's IndieWebCamp Pixel Art](https://aaronparecki.com/2018/01/21/11/pixel-art)
- Publish replies to others' sites using Webmentions: [James' Coffee Blog, Replies](https://jamesg.blog/replies/)
- Post Tweets on your own site first, then syndicate to Twitter: [Sebastiaan Andeweg's tweets](https://seblog.nl/)
- Summarize all IndieWeb-based RSVP events in a calendar: [Jamie Tanna's RSVPs](https://www.jvt.me/rsvps/)
- Work together on MicroPub/Sub as a new social reading protocol: [Neal Mather's blog](https://doubleloop.net/)
- Join the IndieWeb ring to promote own and others' sites: [Horst Gutmann's blog](https://zerokspot.com/)
**Addendum** 29th April: I never thought to receive that many positive feedback! This article is suddenly one of the most popular I recently wrote, made it to [Lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs/domain/brainbaking.com) and [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31199973), and was boosted over eight times on Mastodon. Funny, the more _meta_ a blog article is, the more popular it is.