What Is Waxy.org?
Waxy.org is the personal website and project sandbox of Andy Baio, a writer and developer who has built or helped build a long list of web projects. It is not a company site, a news outlet, or a commercial product — it is one person's space for blogging, archiving, and documenting his own work. If you are trying to figure out whether Waxy.org is a publication you should follow, a tool you can use, or the home of a specific project, the short answer is: it is primarily a personal blog that also serves as the hub for Baio's various side projects.
Who runs it
The site describes itself plainly as "the personal sandbox of Andy Baio." Baio is the common thread behind everything hosted or referenced there. The site's own description lists XOXO, Upcoming, Belong.io, Playfic, Kind of Bloop, and Kickstarter among the things he made or helped build. That list is useful because it tells you what kind of site this is: a place where the person behind those projects writes about them, rather than a brand or organization publishing under a masthead.
What you actually find there
Waxy.org functions mainly as a blog. Posts are dated and signed by Baio, and they tend to be first-person updates about projects, changes to the site, and reflections on maintaining things over time. The content is a mix of:
- Project announcements and updates — new work, redesigns, and shutdowns.
- Retrospectives on long-running projects — what happened, why, and what changed.
- Site maintenance notes — small changes to Waxy.org itself.
A representative example is the "Waxy Refresh" series of posts. In one, Baio explains that he spent several months quietly updating several of his projects, including his blog and Supercut.org. In another, he announces the retirement of Playfic, the interactive fiction community he launched in 2012 with his then-teenaged nephew, Cooper, citing maintenance and obsolescence after 14 years. A third post covers a refresh of Supercut.org, a browsable archive of supercut videos he first launched in 2011, which went offline at the end of 2015 after his server was hacked, returned in 2020 after he audited his old PHP for security holes, and was later redesigned and cleaned up.
These posts are characteristic of the site: long-running personal projects, honest accounts of what went wrong, and incremental fixes rather than product marketing.
Why it is not a commercial product or news site
Nothing in the site's own description frames it as a business. There is no pricing page, no subscription tier, and no editorial team. The only pricing-related link found on the site points to buying a book at an external domain (thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com), which is a separate project, not a Waxy.org product. You should not assume the site is free in the sense of offering a paid service for nothing — it simply is not selling anything in the first place. It is a personal record.
How to use it
If you are looking for a specific project Baio built, Waxy.org is often the place where its status is documented — including when it shuts down, as with Playfic. If you want to follow his writing, the blog is the main surface, and posts are also available via RSS (the site notes that readers who follow entirely via RSS may miss visual refreshes). If you want to browse an archive he maintains, Supercut.org is linked from his updates and accepts suggestions through an "Add" link.
In short: treat Waxy.org as a personal blog and project index, not as a service to sign up for or a news source to cite. Its value is in Baio's first-hand accounts of building, maintaining, and retiring web projects over more than a decade.