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!

Content related

• Publish reviews of books/music/... in a cool sortable grid: Chris Burnell's Music
• Hack together your own last.fm to scrobble music to your own site: Jan Boddez' Owning My Scrobbles
• Sync your laptop battery, local weather, and current location with your site: Aaron Parecki's homepage
• Publicly display global website statistics: Luke Harris' stats page
• More stats: game playtime, AWStats server data: Roy Tang's stats
• Create and regularly update a "uses" page: Ru Singh' uses page
• Create and regularly update a "now" page: Derek Sivers' the /now page movement
• Auto-import game metadata from How Long To Beat and others: Jefklak's Codex games page
• Use your own site to publish checkins instead of Foursquare: Henrique Dias' checkins
• Regularly publish week reviews or link bundles: Stefan Imhoff's Link Bundle #15
• Have an "on this day" page that displays posts from previous years: Frank Meeuwsen's on this day archive
• Group multiple posts into series: Amos' long-form series
• Group multiple posts into research questions: Emmanuel Quartey's questions section
• Syndicate the HTTP blog to a Gemini capsule: Brain Baking Gemini (defunct)

Design related

• Create an official coat of arms as the logo of your site: Marijn Florence's heraldry adventure
• Design your site around ever-evolving note-taking systems: Andy Matuschak's Evergreen Notes
• An audible frequency graph that determines posting activity: Chris Burnells' All posts archive
• Write a custom dynamic blog engine from scratch, because we can: Jan-Lukas Else's blog
• Implement a simple client-site search using lunr.js: Brain Baking archives
• Show articles from others blogs you read below your own articles: an article from Drew DeVault
• Use a public inbox as a commenting system: an article from Drew DeVault
• Implement reaction buttons for each post: Jan-Lukas Else's thoughts on reactions
• Emulate the multi-pane layout of an e-mail client: Brian Lovin's writings
• Each post has a unique HTML design/layout: Aegir's Words

IndieWeb related

• Have a guestbook page where people can send Webmentions to to sign it: Ana Rodrigues' guestbook
• Collaborative pixel-art that gets saved every five minutes: Aaron Parecki's IndieWebCamp Pixel Art
• Publish replies to others' sites using Webmentions: James' Coffee Blog, Replies
• Post Tweets on your own site first, then syndicate to Twitter: Sebastiaan Andeweg's tweets
• Summarize all IndieWeb-based RSVP events in a calendar: Jamie Tanna's RSVPs
• Work together on MicroPub/Sub as a new social reading protocol: Neal Mather's blog
• Join the IndieWeb ring to promote own and others' sites: Horst Gutmann's blog
• Build a custom Webmention receiver/sender: IndieWeb examples

RSS related

• Provide multiple RSS feeds for notes, articles, etc: Ton Zijlstra's feeds
• Add query capabilities to RSS feeds: Eli's RSS navigational tips
• Automatic publishing of favorites from an RSS reader: Peter Rukavina's favorites
• Styled OPML Blogrolls that can be imported into your reader: Ruben Schade's Omake OPML
• Styled RSS feeds to better explain what a web feed is: Matt Webb's RSS feed
• A "Reply via email" link in each RSS post to encourage interaction: Mike Harley's RSS feed
• Secret RSS-only posts that do not appear on the website: Ton Zijlstra's RSS feed
• Send out newsletters based on your RSS feed: Kev Quirk is newslettering again (defunct)
• Add the location from where you write to your RSS feed: Ruben Schade's RSS feed

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 and Hacker News, and was boosted over eight times on Mastodon. Funny, the more meta a blog article is, the more popular it is.