Notes ·
I Found More Than 2,000 Joshes on the Independent Web
Joshing You may be one of my favorite web directories I have stumbled across in a while.
It has one qualification for inclusion:
Your name is Josh.
As of August 20, the directory contains 2,083 Joshes, with 699 added during the last 30 days. Apparently 1,206 go by Josh, 849 use Joshua, and 165 use Josh as a middle name. (We’re Not Joshing You)
And, yes, joshuamorris.info is actually in there.
I couldn’t find myself while browsing it, so I went looking more carefully. My listing is currently on the first page:
Joshua Morris A snapshot of what Joshua Morris is focused on now — building, writing, reading, listening, and other current work on joshuamorris.info.
The directory links directly to my Now page. Because the directory is sorted by recently updated sites, there does not appear to be a permanent permalink for my particular entry, so its position will move over time. (We’re Not Joshing You)
The name is funny, but the project is accidentally a really good directory of the personal web.
There are portfolios, blogs, notebooks, experiments, engineering sites, art projects and wonderfully strange little corners of the Internet that would be difficult to discover through a normal search engine.
The /wander/ feature makes that even better. Instead of searching for something specific, you can just start exploring Josh websites.
That is how I ended up finding sites like Josh Janssen’s, which treats the entire personal website like a screenplay. Even the navigation and interactions continue the idea, including scene cards you can drag around.
Then there is Josh Leverette’s Coding in Space, a beautifully minimal technical site currently publishing a series explaining LLMs from first principles.
And Joshua Chappelow’s site is another one I found while wandering through the list.
The best part is that none of these sites feel like profiles on somebody else’s platform.
They are places.
Someone decided how their little portion of the web should look, what belongs there and how someone else should explore it.
Search engines and social networks made the web extraordinarily good at finding exactly what we ask for.
Projects like this restore something we lost along the way:
finding something because you weren’t looking for it.
Apparently all it took was gathering a couple thousand people named Josh.