Here is a chart of some of the most popular Icelandic websites. It’s not out of all the websites that exist, but it still shows some of the major ones.

Here is a link to the full chart.

The first three on the image (not on the link) are news sites. The fourth is a very useful site for if you plan to go to Iceland – it’s like the yellow pages, Google maps, and a free SMS service all on one site. “Leit” is an Icelandic search site. “Gegnir” is the online catalogue for a lot of the libraries. “Vedur” is for weather and earthquake information. Most towns or areas have a website and it’s often just the town name, like the one for Reykjavík on this image. You can usually go there for a schedule of community events and some useful addresses.

“Bland” is a really useful site for practising Icelandic because it has a lot of buying/selling forums. Usually people are to-the-point when posting, so you don’t get overwhelmed with text and you see a lot of repeated phrases. I’m not sure if many people would sell you things if you live abroad because they seem to like to hand over things in person (it doesn’t hurt to ask though).

“Timarit” is only useful if you like reading archived periodicals and newspapers, but it’s a very good way to practice slightly-older Icelandic (generally from the 1800’s to the present) and to research topics. You can search for keywords and then find PDFs of, for example, comic strips, articles, recipes, stories, and government publications. For the more recent publications sometimes Timarit has a deal with the publishers where they’ll show the material to the public only after a number of years. At least a few of the news sites have PDF versions of their newspapers that you can download for free anyway, if you just wanted to browse the recent ones. The downside of Timarit is that it doesn’t seem to have an option where you can download the entire item at once, you have to download each page of it individually (if it does have this option and I’ve overlooked it please tell me because I use this site a lot!).

Some of these other sites I’ve covered in previous posts, and there are some that I’m surprised don’t regularly make it onto the online list (I didn’t look at the explanation of the chart at all, so maybe it’s only the sites run by a certain internet provider). If you have no resources for native-written Icelandic text then it’s a good idea to just randomly visit a lot of these sites to improve your Icelandic in a lot of different types of vocabulary.

I’m pretty sure the two Icelandic blogging sites require a kennitala (SSN) to register, on top of that I seem to recall one of them actually had a rule where you had to write your blog in Icelandic. I don’t know if that rule still exists or not. You can still view other people’s blogs even without having an account, and that’s a good way to both practice Icelandic and take note of some cultural things.