11 ms·

Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs

783 points by ramkarthikk 6mo ago

With social media and now AI, its important to keep the indie web alive. There are many people who write frequently. Blogosphere tries to highlight them by fetching the recent posts from personal blogs across many categories. There are two versions: Minimal (HN-inspired, fast, static): https://text.blogosphere.app/ https://text.blogosphere.app/ Non-minimal: https://blogosphere.app/ https://blogosphere.app/ If you don't find your blog (or your favorite ones), please add them. I will review and approve it.

AndrewStephens 6mo ago
I love this (and submitted my blog) - people bemoan the death of the Old Web™ but in reality there is still heaps of great content being created.
randusername 6mo ago
Great work, I haven't updated my public site in years while I waited for the LLM stuff to play out, but you've inspired me to put it back out there and submit.
ronb1964 6mo ago
Funny timing — I tried to submit my own Show HN today for a small Linux app I've been building and got blocked because my account is too new. Spent the afternoon reading through HN threads to build up some karma instead. Feels like the indie software equivalent of the same problem this project is trying to solve — it's getting harder for small, genuine projects to find an audience without gaming some system first. Appreciate what you've built here!
- yunnpp 6mo ago
  HN submissions are reviewed/banned after the fact as far as I know. It is reasonable to put a minimum karma threshold before one is allowed to submit. Conversely, this site shared here relies on manual reviews before something goes live, which won't scale at all. There's no system to "game" here.
caaqil 6mo ago
I will be that guy: how is this different from HN? Or the many niche subreddits that already do this? I am seriously asking. To me, it seems like a poor version of subreddits with HN shell to wash it down.
- amoriodi 6mo ago
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zephyrwhimsy 6mo ago
[flagged]
susam 6mo ago
This is a very nice project! Thank you for creating it and sharing it here on HN. I like the minimal version more but the modern version is quite nice too. I would probably stick to the minimal version but since it seems to lack the search feature I end up using the modern version for that. By the way, some minor issues I found: 1. In the minimal version, when browsing the list of blogs I cannot get past page 12. The last page the UI lets me navigate to is https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-12 https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-12 which shows blogs up to names starting with 'M'. I can reach page 13 by manually editing the URL to https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-13 https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-13 which shows two blogs starting with 'N'. However, pages 14 and beyond just load the home page. Surely there are more blogs with names starting with 'O', 'P', etc.? 2. The modern version at https://blogosphere.app/ https://blogosphere.app/ uses infinite scroll, which makes it impossible to reach the footer. Each time I scroll down, more content loads and pushes the footer further away. I was only able to view the footer by modifying the DOM in the browser's developer tools. It would be nice if there were a straightforward way to access the footer.
- ramkarthikk 6mo ago
  Thank you for the detailed feedback. I'm glad you like this project. 1. Yeah, there are definitely more blogs. Seems like an issue paginating and fetching it at build time. I will check this. 2. I generally don't prefer infinite scroll but since people are used to it on social media, I kept it on the modern version. It does make it impossible to see the footer. I will figure out a way around this. In the meantime, the "Submit" page should display the footer. I'm also going to add search to the minimal version since I also prefer it over the modern version and search is useful.
  - sphars 6mo ago
    Regarding the infinite scroll with the footer, I like the path Valve has taken with the Steam store homepage. The footer is part of the infinite scroll, as in, when you reach the footer, the infinite scroll continues.
  - alsetmusic 6mo ago
dalmo3 6mo ago
TBH I'd love to see that idea as a /blogs list here at HN.
freetonik 6mo ago
Very cool! Love the minimal design a lot, unsurprisingly. My Minifeed [1] started with a similar goal of having a "HN for blogs", but then it grew to include search, related recommendations, custom feeds, lists, etc. I don't have categories though. [1] https://minifeed.net/ https://minifeed.net/
evanjrowley 6mo ago
Addition of a "Dark Mode" button would be much appreciated!
zahlman 6mo ago
> Minimal (HN-inspired, fast, static): https://text.blogosphere.app/ https://text.blogosphere.app/ Could you add a form submission button next to the filter, so that it doesn't require JavaScript? (Or actually that can probably be done easily enough with some kind of CSS variable-setting trick...?)
getaid 6mo ago
Cool project.
sourcegrift 6mo ago
"A woman had sex with identical twins and now it's impossible to tell who is the father", is this a blog post or news or sarcastic news or what the hell
gray_wolf_99 6mo ago
Great idea!
Johnny_Bonk 6mo ago
One recommendation is to keep header fixed on scroll so you can always nav away. most sites fail to do this it seems
- mm263 6mo ago
  Fixed header isn't always a good thing, it can also be a mistake. Since content is the product, let the content take up all available space and use your browser navigation capabilities to navigate if necessary
zephyrwhimsy 6mo ago
[flagged]
holtwick 6mo ago
Small web, try this one https://bubbles.town https://bubbles.town
- viermalbe 6mo ago
  Bubbles is different, because the front page is created by real people voting. It also supports comments, blogs in EN and DE, as well as following blogs.
givemeethekeys 6mo ago
This is a great idea. I think you should ask people to pay a subscription for commenting. Turn it into a community supported site from the get go!
skeptrune 6mo ago
This is awesome! I'm happy someone made this exist.
ashwinne 6mo ago
I would love a old-school search engine that pulls results purely from a well curated list of websites and blogs.
- swyx 6mo ago
  https://kagi.com/smallweb/ https://kagi.com/smallweb/
blue_hex 6mo ago
i can't describe how happy this project makes me feel. Honestly, i don't even know why. I mean, the idea is great but it's nothing "extra", still it just feels right. Like breath of fresh air.
quanwinn 6mo ago
Love this! Was the UI done with Claude or some LLM? Not a critique, just curious because the designs give off that vibe to me.
rodarima 6mo ago
Amazing that the minimal version works in Dillo, except for the categories menu which uses JS (using a form and submit button inside a noscript tag would work as a fallback).
nelsonfigueroa 6mo ago
Ooooh I love these indie web aggregators. I wrote about some of my favorite ones here if anyone's curious: https://nelson.cloud/how-i-discover-new-blogs/ https://nelson.cloud/how-i-discover-new-blogs/. But here are some of my fav ways to discover blogs: - https://minifeed.net/welcome https://minifeed.net/welcome - https://indieblog.page/ https://indieblog.page/ - https://1mb.club/ https://1mb.club/ - https://512kb.club/ https://512kb.club/ - https://250kb.club/ https://250kb.club/
- busymom0 6mo ago
  I'd like to submit my own aggregator to your list: https://limereader.com/ https://limereader.com/ It aggregates the top articles on STEAMD topics (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math, and Design) from various forums and displays them in chronological order. This includes forums like Hacker News, Tildes, Lobsters, Slashdot, Bear, and some science, tech & programming related subreddits. You can read more here: https://limereader.com/about https://limereader.com/about
- rahkiin 6mo ago
  I should create an aggregator aggregator
- eleventen 6mo ago
  A few more: - https://powrss.com/ https://powrss.com/ - https://blogroll.org/ https://blogroll.org/ - https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/
landdate 6mo ago
This is awesome. I find myself seeking out blogs nowadays as many of the best forums have died out and reddit has dropped in quality significantly. I typically use marginalia and wiby to make finding posts from blogs easier, but I like the idea of providing hn style mechanics to blog posts, so many of which lack the ability to comment/discuss the material. At the same time, while I think this is a useful tool, I am a little weary of the aggregation and consolidation of the web.
KronisLV 6mo ago
Vaguely related, I did an extremely basic RSS feed combiner ages ago: https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/ https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/ when there was that one post where people could share their blogs and many of those had RSS feeds. That said, it got its list of feeds from the repo that someone made which hasn't been updated in a few years, so even if new blog content gets pulled, the list of blogs doesn't change. Oh well, wasn't a super serious project.
glerk 6mo ago
Sweet! Glad to see so many active personal blogs. We should push to bring back RSS feeds somehow. I really miss that era.
janiecewhite 6mo ago
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musasaabi 6mo ago
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rpgbr 6mo ago
Very cool! We have something similar — asort of “planet” — for personal blogs in Brazil. It's open source, maybe it can be useful for someone: https://github.com/manualdousuario/lerama https://github.com/manualdousuario/lerama Our instance: https://lerama.pcdomanual.com https://lerama.pcdomanual.com
boxedemp 6mo ago
Very cool!! It's actually full of blogs! I've seen lots of claims for this kind of thing, glad to see you followed through!
millionclicks 6mo ago
Awesome idea. You should launch this on Buildfeed.co.
matheusmoreira 6mo ago
> If you don't find your blog, please add them. > RSS / Atom Feed URL * I really need to implement an RSS/Atom feed in my static site generator, the lack of this feature is really starting to hurt. I can probably get Claude to help me with this.
- dllu 6mo ago
  I vibe coded RSS feed for my static site generator a few months ago: https://github.com/dllu/dllup-rs/blob/main/src/main.rs#L850 https://github.com/dllu/dllup-rs/blob/main/src/main.rs#L850 and was pleasantly surprised to see my blog was already on this website!
stevenicr 6mo ago
I see the footer, then it disappears - (next scroll kicks in) - see foot, disappears, repeat.. (desktop, firefox) It's time we bring back webrings and optional auto-check for recip links - with options to check for nofollow and do a thing or not. Webring code anyone can self host - have notification and approval and accept nofollow links as okay by default should work fine. Thinking of them getting bigger, might need to give surfers and option to sort by tags / categories / newest / oldest. have option for website owner to prioritize or highlight a few as first seen each month..
OpFour 6mo ago
I made something similar, but for Linux news and information! thelinuxreport.com :D
jadbox 6mo ago
No voting? How is it curated?
paulpauper 6mo ago
"All submissions are manually reviewed before appearing in the directory." it's like the late 90s early 2000s again
rav3ndust 6mo ago
cool stuff. have already found and bookmarked a few interesting sites just going through the list. submitted my own blog there as well. it is cool seeing human-curated directories coming back (not that they truly left, but i've been seeing more and more over the last few years around the 'indie web') i do a little something like this on my own site, but it is just a simple directory of sites that i like listed by category on a single page.
BLACKCRAB 6mo ago
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ddingus 6mo ago
I love this. THANK YOU.
zephyrwhimsy 6mo ago
[flagged]
aavci 6mo ago
I love the idea of such frontpages. There should be one for small scale b2c apps as well to help discovery
sehgalmayank001 6mo ago
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xkbear89 6mo ago
[flagged]
meander_water 6mo ago
Cool idea! I actually did something similar but with ~130k Substack publications (they're just RSS feeds) https://findsubstack.com https://findsubstack.com
414techie 6mo ago
This is a very useful project. Thank you for taking it on! I just spent at least 30 minutes reading instead of mindless scrolling. This reminded me of the good feelings I had when I first used the web. The content is novel and written for the authors enjoyment. The web was better for people then and you just recreated that. I like the minimal version better, but it is hard to use on mobile. If there was a way that you could make a minimal version with better accessibility and larger fonts, I’d use that. Until then, I’ve bookmarked the modern version.
yuppiepuppie 6mo ago
I like this new found indie web resurgence! A few months someone posted a directory of blogs, I ended up building https://hnarcade.com https://hnarcade.com and now this :) Discovery still remains a problem - besides this post on HN how do you plan to get people to visit the site and discover new posts? I started a newsletter to help with this, but keen to hear ideas.
zephyrwhimsy 6mo ago
[flagged]
rafayexalter 6mo ago
nice, what stack did you use?
londonanon 6mo ago
Thank you for making this, the Internet needs more of these. The young ones among us are likely still scratching their heads whilst trying to understand what RSS is...this puts it all together in a neat little package ala Kagi, Blogroll, etc. Good ol' directory-style.
RikiGohain 6mo ago
its great
carte_blanche 6mo ago
Looks nice! It's getting hard to keep up with all the recent posts on indie web aggregators (a good problem to have!). I've observed that I always get excited about seeing one such tool -> try to make it a habit to visit those aggregators occasionally -> forget about them -> rinse and repeat. A great execution on the problem of discovery within the blogosphere is Wander, which was posted here a few days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422759. I discover great, small websites not because I found them in any aggregator's list, but more often via someone whose opinions I trust recommended a particular post to me. Wander executes on that idea rather brilliantly. I've found myself going to my Wander console[^1] more regularly now and I keep finding great folks to follow. [^1]: https://www.siddharthagolu.com/wander/ https://www.siddharthagolu.com/wander/
xtiansimon 6mo ago
I see it’s possible to subscribe to RSS from the app, but I can’t find the link on the website.
Discoaaron 6mo ago
Love these, please default to follow system theme
deleted 6mo ago
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oortcrate_1 6mo ago
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unvalley 6mo ago
I like this kind of idea. Do you require RSS for the listed blogs? curious about the behind.
rallypi 6mo ago
[flagged]
zhichuanxun 6mo ago
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Grokify 6mo ago
That's a great idea and a very nice project. It's great that to move back to curated blog lists from thoughtful authors. I've been doing something similar specific to my interests so far. Will check yours out. Here's my "Planet AI": https://grokify.github.io/planet-ai/ https://grokify.github.io/planet-ai/ And some selected article/discussion analysis: https://grokify.github.io/frontierpulse/ https://grokify.github.io/frontierpulse/
iiikbh 5mo ago
Amazing , I think LiveKit will handle many things also with that, Great job!
manuelr-t 5mo ago
Really like the rss feature
danielszlaski 6mo ago
Nice and clean.
tombert 6mo ago
Interesting. I submitted mine.
chistev 6mo ago
Great job. Submitted my blog.
- ramkarthikk 6mo ago
  Thank you. I approved your blog. Quick note: It looks like your feed items don't have published date which makes it hard to store and sort recent posts.
  - chistev 6mo ago
    >Thank you. I approved your blog. Can't find it. > It looks like your feed items don't have published date which makes it hard to store and sort recent posts Okay, you mean the RSS feed?
the_axiom 6mo ago
[flagged]
- notachatbot123 6mo ago
  I would recommend deleting it, reading up on fascism and psychology and trying to fix whatever makes you prone to extremism in a different way that radicalism and hate.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- nextaccountic 6mo ago
  The OP doesn't need to approve every blog that is submitted
obsidianbases1 6mo ago
Something like this is very much needed. I hope to see more things like this. What would be really cool is if there was a personalized algorithm (for you page) that stored data and processed locally.
- ramkarthikk 6mo ago
  Thank you. I wanted to mostly stay away from algorithmic feed to stay true to RSS. On the non-minimal version of the site, you can sign up and follow blogs to have a "For You" tab, but it's still recent posts from blogs you follow.
  - Miraltar 6mo ago
    Instead or in addition to following blogs, what I'd love to have is a way to filter out those I don't like.
    - obsidianbases1 6mo ago
      Local keyword exclusions (to keep the server requirement minimal) might be pretty high impact.
ramraj07 6mo ago
give people the ability to curate their own collections and publish them
- ramkarthikk 6mo ago
  On the non-minimal version, you can signup for an account and follow blogs (curate your fav blogs). I will add an option to making your list public.
Hard_Space 6mo ago
Incredible that we are regressing back to webrings and hand-curated lists like this, both of which I remember well. That's not a criticism! I guess that the quality-drop in search wasn't quite enough to make it happen, but the advent of AI content predomination will be.
- blackbrokkoli 6mo ago
  Do you have any idea what killed webrings? It seems to be simply a great idea...like...should we bring it back? Could we?
  - Mezzie 6mo ago
    Search. There was some overlap between the webring age and the early search age, but once search became entrenched and useful, webrings faded. Blogrolls survived for a little bit longer, but it was search. Specifically, once search became the way you found the first page/site to begin with. Before search as default, you found sites in a bunch of scattershot ways: advertisements, word of mouth, lists in books, or lists on websites that updated periodically (that you had to have found/heard about one of the other ways) for example. Then you crawled out from there because that was the only way to find things. You had to either know the URL or use a link. And not all of the links/sites in the webrings were good. Once search got good enough, people found the initial site via search and instead of taking their time clicking through a webring which might at any point lead them somewhere dead or useless, it was quicker to go back to the search page to find something else. Page access went from being a chained together web of back and forth links to a 2 step process of search -> page.
  - manuelmoreale 6mo ago
    Webrings are very much still a thing and Ray has an awesome page on his site all about them https://brisray.com/utils/webrings.htm https://brisray.com/utils/webrings.htm
- voxleone 6mo ago
  We're heading to a future where (when) friction is a luxury. Anyways, I thank the organizers for the rare opportunity. Long live Blogosphere.app, long live blogs.
ml- 6mo ago
Nice job. A small suggestion, unless I completely missed it, an option to filter by post / blog language.
- ramkarthikk 6mo ago
  Great feedback. I will add search to this minimal version. The non-minimal version comes with search. Filter by language is something neither has and will be a great addition.
setnone 6mo ago
This is great. I'm curious what's your vision on adding comments?
- ramkarthikk 6mo ago
  If you're referring to comments on the website, I plan to keep it minimal (the text version is a static site). If you're referring to comments on blogs in general, I have many thoughts. Back in the day, comments used to be how you connected with people and let other people find you. It also came with spam (spam plugins could only do so much). With the rise of static site generators, most people don't have comments on their blogs now. It is something I miss though.
  - Siecje 6mo ago
    There is cusdis[1] for comments on a static site. 1: https://cusdis.com/ https://cusdis.com/
  - AndrewStephens 6mo ago
    I haven’t had comments on my blog for over a decade now and I don’t miss them. For every useful and informative comment I got several spammy or rude reply. Anyone who wants to let me know something about my blog can message me on social media. I’ve seen blogs that do not host comments themselves but instead automatically surface social media (usually mastodon) comments which I think is a useful technique.
    - bookofjoe 6mo ago
      I've had comments (open, anonymous, no screening) on my blog since it started in 2004. Back in the day when it was very popular, most of my blog posts were the result of reader tips/advice/heads-up/etc. I have to work MUCH harder now that comments have pretty much dried up.
    - paulnpace 6mo ago
      > Anyone who wants to let me know something about my blog can message me on social media. But, can they?
SirFatty 6mo ago
Did you use Frontpage to create your frontpage?
- reconnecting 6mo ago
  <meta name="generator" content="FrontPage 4.0">
  - cr125rider 6mo ago
    Then add A BUNCH of extra XML to bloat the page nicely
    - reconnecting 6mo ago
      Back in the day, MS FrontPage was indeed synonymous with nested and unreliable page structure. I wish I could go back and tell them it is nothing compared to what passes for web output in the 21st century.
deleted 6mo ago
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postalcoder 6mo ago
If anyone looking for something even more minimalist, give the HN x Small Web RSS feed a try https://hcker.news/feeds/atom?period=day&limit=50&smallweb=true https://hcker.news/feeds/atom?period=day&limit=50&smallweb=t...
mmargenot 6mo ago
Very cool! This was a good impetus to actually add RSS to my blog.
kangraemin 6mo ago
[flagged]
- ramkarthikk 6mo ago
  Its chronological - most recently published first (no algorithm or voting).
- efilife 6mo ago
  Don't engage. This is a bot.
  - InsideOutSanta 6mo ago
    I wonder how to deal with the growing number of bots on HN. Right now, they are easy to spot, but they're getting better (and maybe I just think I can spot them because of the obvious examples). Maybe a "this is a bot" button, but no doubt that would be abused.
    - cosmicgadget 6mo ago
      Should have to pass a turing test before each comment.
sebastianconcpt 6mo ago
Yeah we need to make curated human signals stronger.
Biologist123 6mo ago
Nice. I can see a version of this working for ever more niche areas. Curated reading lists for areas of interest. At which point a curated list of curated lists becomes viable!
jasoneckert 6mo ago
This is great, thanks! It sort of feels like browsing for gems in a used bookstore and stumbling onto authentic, personal writing. I'm always up for that, and plan on spending plenty of time exploring the list. I’ve submitted mine as well - cheers!
- glenstein 6mo ago
  >It sort of feels like browsing for gems in a used bookstore and stumbling onto authentic, personal writing I don't know that I've heard a better description of the thing the so-called small web is about than that. It's the clearest answer to the "why" of having a small web of discoverable personal blogs and sites.
- ramkarthikk 6mo ago
  That is such a lovely way to put it. Do you mind if I add it to the about page and link to this comment?
  - jasoneckert 6mo ago
    Of course I don't mind - please do! :-)
nextaccountic 6mo ago
Question, is this strictly chronological, or is there anything at all to make this an "algorithmic feed" like HN, reddit, twitter, or facebook? (list is roughly in the order of less shitty to more shitty, but note that none of them are chronological, unlike, say, a RSS reader aggregating some set of blogs)
- ramkarthikk 6mo ago
  This is strictly chronological. No voting, no algorithm.
dchuk 6mo ago
Very clean site, well done. I’ve built something similar, but it also has an algorithmic front page option as well based on the “standard” algorithm from Reddit/HN: https://engineered.at https://engineered.at I also have it wired up to gpt nano for topic extraction and summary creation per post, if you register for an account (free) you can also follow sources and topics to fine tune things. I have a big list of features to continue adding to it, like an ability to “claim” your site so you can get some analytics from the site, and potentially to boost your site in the algorithm. Might also add a jobs board. If you’re interested, while this site is closed source, the feed monitoring rails engine is open source: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor
- Yokohiii 6mo ago
  Not sure if you want feedback on this, but mine is free. The lists are impenetrable for my eye, I think an key mistake is that you don't use an accent color for titles in lists (i.e. look at a google serp). That you don't directly link the content, felt like an offense, followed by a slap in the face looking at an AI generated summary. The layout feels too reddit and too industrialized and the way you plan to progress the project, rings my "pet project to slam ad's on" bells. I think the pure intent of OPs site naturally makes it more approachable and likeable.
  - dchuk 6mo ago
    I’ll ignore the tone here and solely reply to the feedback (go take a nice walk or something, no need to be so fired up, it’s just the internet): - noted on the readability call out. Was trying to keep things minimal, similar to HN itself, I’ll see what I can do to make the contrast better - I added the summaries because it’s something I want on sites like this. Every individual article page contains a direct link to the original site. I’m intentionally not rendering the full article content like a feed reader so that a gist/teaser is available for users to hopefully send them to the original article. - you are free to not use the site if you think my intent is nefarious, again it’s just the internet after all
lemiffe 6mo ago
Great idea! Could you add a "music" category please for blogs?
LostMyLogin 6mo ago
Love this! New homepage for me. Do you have a buy me coffee button to help keep it live?
- glenstein 6mo ago
  Right! My concern with these tools is sometimes they are too good for this world and likely to live a few months.
- ramkarthikk 6mo ago
  Appreciate it :) I don't have one. This is hosted on Cloudflare as a static site and a cron that runs on a $5 VM (that also hosts other things). So it doesn't cost me much to keep it alive other than the domain cost. I built it this way intentionally so that I can keep this running forever.
glenstein 6mo ago
Love this! I very much appreciate the inclusion of a lightweight version, as I think lightweight discovery for blogs and the small web is where good tools and apps are needed. Also, given that the lightweight version is very hn styled format it naturally leads my brain to imagining a version with upvotes and commenters (which may be a good or a bad thing) but with the link submission part automated. Not necessarily the intent here but it was the first time that particular combination of possibilities occurred to me as a way to do things. Also curious about how these blogs are indexed/reviewed. Is the list ever pruned over time due to inactivity?
- ramkarthikk 6mo ago
  Thank you. The initial list was from blogroll.org (mentioned in the about page, and I emailed the person who built that). From then on, I review every submission that happens via the form. The scheduler flags blogs that fail and doesn't try to fetch after a few tries. I'm still working on an effective way to re-review and prune. Open to any feedback.
  - thesuitonym 6mo ago
    I'd say a periodic job that looks at the last update of all your blogs, and removes those that haven't updated in over a year would be generally agreeable. If you want to be exceptionally kind, you can also email the submitter and tell them their blog has been removed due to inactivity, so they'll remember to submit if they start blogging again.
  - glenstein 6mo ago
    I suppose my dream would be that the protocolization of this from back in the day gets revived in some way. Like a google pagecrawl style index built up from blogrolls (though I don't know if the blogroll itself was ever literally protocol-ized), combined with some checking of RSS feeds for activity. Or webrings, or something else. Though in some respects these are less smart than what you're already doing, but I would like to think there's an elegant way to make an index emerge organically to minimize the editorial burden of any one person.
bovermyer 6mo ago
There's also this: https://minifeed.net/global https://minifeed.net/global However, I think (text.)Blogosphere has a nicer interface, personally. Maybe I'm just used to HN.
Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago
Yes!! I found a new website to use :-) I just hope if you can add dark-mode, I use hackernews essential which adds dark mode and more features which I really like in hackernews, Perhaps something like this can be added but overall I really like it! You have (essentially) just made something which I imagined 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41789661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41789661: Ask HN: Are you interested in a Hacker News alternative which doesnt focus on AI (Oct 9 2024) My point, which has only grown to an even larger degree is that Hackernews has too many AI discussions, which both feels a bit fomo to me and also I am seeing AI generated blog posts and comments now on Hackernews as well. At some point, I want a website where I can talk about the more human aspects, some occasional AI mention is fine but not if a quarter or half of front page is hackernews and some genuinely nice projects don't get the attention :( I had joined hackernews to read those content pieces and fell in love with the human discussion aspect but now there are definitely moments of browsing hackernews which makes me feel as to what I had written in the ask HN my last line within the ask HN was: I just want people who don't want the latest ai hype to gather around and discuss some other cool things which are "not" AI. This kind of fits into that Adding my submissions of blog-posts into it in sometime :) See you there!
rednafi 6mo ago
This is great. But I’ve bookmarked at least 10 of these aggregators over the years, and I never revisit any of them. Partly because I don’t have the time to browse and discover new content. I also don’t read the blog spam from prolific writers who pop up here every two days, especially the low-quality ones constantly yapping about AI. So the number of blogs I revisit is a handful, and I have a page on my site listing them [1]. Some of the blogs I’ve listed also have backlinks to my site. It’s super simple and works fairly well for me. Plus there’s rss. [1]: https://rednafi.com/blogroll/ https://rednafi.com/blogroll/
efilife 6mo ago
This doesn't have an RSS feed? bummer
- gorfian_robot 6mo ago
  yeah +12 if it had an rss feed
  - ramkarthikk 6mo ago
    It's the next item on the list I plan to add. Likely will be adding it today.
Kye 6mo ago
Variety! I appreciate that it's not all tech writing from tech blogs from people in tech like almost every blog list/aggregator thing on HN.
arrty88 6mo ago
super dope. now make it infinite scroll and put ads all over the place! /s
joenot443 6mo ago
I love it. I'd love a search bar and maybe a means to sort by popularity (however you define it.) I like that it's free and clean and direct; I hope it remains that way!
BrokenCogs 6mo ago
Now please build a frontpage for all the frontpages on blogs
colejhudson 6mo ago
Lovely! Those who enjoy this might also like: - https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb - https://blogroll.org/ https://blogroll.org/ - https://minifeed.net/welcome https://minifeed.net/welcome - https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/
- peterspath 6mo ago
  https://powrss.com https://powrss.com and https://slashpages.net https://slashpages.net is also a nice way to discover new blogs...
bryanhogan 6mo ago
Any plans on adding a way to filter out "lower quality" posts which usually dominate chronologically sorted post lists? And, possibly a way to filter type of content more in-depth than just one category?
- ramkarthikk 6mo ago
  No plans to add a filter for "lower quality" since that takes away from the ethos of RSS. Certainly looking to add more ways to filter. Open to ideas.
  - kypro 6mo ago
    It's refreshing to to see something intentionally uncurated. I think "low quality" content has it's place. A lot of my favourite blogs back in the day could be considered "low quality", but for whatever reason I liked them and read their stuff... Same was true of my own blog. It wasn't particularly high quality but back then even a lowish quality blog would still occasionally be surfaced on Google if the right key words were searched for. I miss this about modern YouTube too... I used to love watching content from small creators even if their content was "lower quality", but it's so hard to discover that type of content today. Everywhere you go there is an algorithm pushing you towards larger and more professional creators. And that can be fine, but it's nice to have some balance.
    - BizarroLand 6mo ago
      If you think about it, Shakespeare's first poem was probably crap. If his entire career were judged from that, then we wouldn't have Hamlet.
    - krapp 6mo ago
      "quality" is something you care about if you want to virtue signal your professional or intellectual capability, usually as part of a monetization scheme. Hacker News cares so much about quality because this forum is attached to a billion dollar startup incubator, and for many people here their persona is business. Posting on substack is business for most people. Posting on medium is business for most people. "Quality" is just another kind of influencer culture. Writing blogs shouldn't be about marketing and reading blogs shouldn't be about maximizing information density. The vast vast majority of blogs on the old web that everyone yearns to return to weren't "high quality." You were just writing about whatever, likely in a style that would get you downvoted on HN for being insufficiently substantive, and if you were lucky someone else might read it. I wouldn't even call it "low quality" so much as "non-commercial."
alc010 6mo ago
[flagged]
_HMCB_ 6mo ago
Superb! Thank you. Psychologically, the minimal version feels perfect; as if it were more connected with the spirit of blogging.
sodapopcan 6mo ago
Very nice, this is great! Love that you give the two UX options. FYI (bug report): In the non-minimal version, navigating by category is janky in FireFox. The logo briefly disappears with the nav jumping up in its place every time you click a category.
- ramkarthikk 6mo ago
  Ah, thank you. I will check this.
  - sodapopcan 6mo ago
    Just following up to say "You fixed it!" :)
wonger_ 6mo ago
FWIW hackr.news has a smallweb filter: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true But kudos for different people working on similar good ideas
napolux 6mo ago
scoring will bring spam and voting brigades if not managed properly
AnonyMD 6mo ago
It's a very modern and clean design.
highspeedbus 6mo ago
That's great. I wish we could convince more people to use similar tools regularly, myself included. It may not 'scale' as well as algorithmic feeds, but maybe that's what will save the Web. We need more sweat and passion, both in curation of content and in the effort to find it.
robertheadley 6mo ago
Great concept, I miss the ability to like things though.
- robertheadley 6mo ago
  ah, looks like the .app version covers that. I will have to check it out outside of work.
siva7 6mo ago
This feels so Yahoo-1994. Love that we are getting back to our origins thanks to AI.
- bookofjoe 6mo ago
  That's so funny: I just reactivated my Yahoo email address.
reedlaw 6mo ago
I've come to the conclusion that Hacker News is the best aggregator out there. Substack knows my interests yet gives terrible recommendations. Youtube constantly recommends the same videos or exaggerates my interest in a topic based on a few views, spamming me with related content until I watch something unrelated. The only downside of Hacker News is that its focus is narrower than other sites. But perhaps because the focus is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting" there is a bias towards things I find interesting with less noise than more commercial offerings.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
l72 6mo ago
I always thought the "planets"[1][2][3] were a neat idea. I wish there were more of them for dedicated topics. Then I can just subscribe to specific planets which pulls curated feeds from various blogs on that topic. [1] Planet Gnome: https://planet.gnome.org/ https://planet.gnome.org/ [2] Planet Debian: https://planet.debian.org/ https://planet.debian.org/ [3] Planet GNU: https://planet.gnu.org/ https://planet.gnu.org/
- 8organicbits 6mo ago
  I've been building an index of planets and related projects. There's a lot, especially for technical topics, but I also wish there were more. Ctrl-F for planet: https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/blogrolls/ https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/blogrolls/ There's an older list at https://web.archive.org/web/20170823064412/http://planetplanet.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170823064412/http://planetplan...
notanormalnerd 6mo ago
Hahahahha... I was trying to build something like this for a while. Seems like I wasn't the only one with this idea. So happy someone finally did it!
gorbiesRedScar 6mo ago
perfect.
riceballs_tlp 6mo ago
How do you curate the blogs that are being added to this? I see that there's a way to submit your own blog, but was there a list you started with initially? Thanks for making this!
gosingk 6mo ago
Nice project
akshitgaur2005 6mo ago
Hey, I am just getting started with blogging, could/should I submit my website too?
tpemist 6mo ago
Thanks for sharing, it's a great idea! but the site is not reachable now, it stuck.
trvz 6mo ago
This is silly. RSS readers exist. Feed a Fever was even better.

783 points by ramkarthikk 6mo ago

AndrewStephens 6mo ago

I love this (and submitted my blog) - people bemoan the death of the Old Web™ but in reality there is still heaps of great content being created.

randusername 6mo ago

Great work, I haven't updated my public site in years while I waited for the LLM stuff to play out, but you've inspired me to put it back out there and submit.

ronb1964 6mo ago

Funny timing — I tried to submit my own Show HN today for a small Linux app I've been building and got blocked because my account is too new. Spent the afternoon reading through HN threads to build up some karma instead. Feels like the indie software equivalent of the same problem this project is trying to solve — it's getting harder for small, genuine projects to find an audience without gaming some system first. Appreciate what you've built here!

yunnpp 6mo ago
HN submissions are reviewed/banned after the fact as far as I know. It is reasonable to put a minimum karma threshold before one is allowed to submit. Conversely, this site shared here relies on manual reviews before something goes live, which won't scale at all. There's no system to "game" here.

caaqil 6mo ago

I will be that guy: how is this different from HN? Or the many niche subreddits that already do this? I am seriously asking. To me, it seems like a poor version of subreddits with HN shell to wash it down.

amoriodi 6mo ago
[dead]

zephyrwhimsy 6mo ago

[flagged]

susam 6mo ago

This is a very nice project! Thank you for creating it and sharing it here on HN. I like the minimal version more but the modern version is quite nice too. I would probably stick to the minimal version but since it seems to lack the search feature I end up using the modern version for that. By the way, some minor issues I found: 1. In the minimal version, when browsing the list of blogs I cannot get past page 12. The last page the UI lets me navigate to is https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-12 https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-12 which shows blogs up to names starting with 'M'. I can reach page 13 by manually editing the URL to https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-13 https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-13 which shows two blogs starting with 'N'. However, pages 14 and beyond just load the home page. Surely there are more blogs with names starting with 'O', 'P', etc.? 2. The modern version at https://blogosphere.app/ https://blogosphere.app/ uses infinite scroll, which makes it impossible to reach the footer. Each time I scroll down, more content loads and pushes the footer further away. I was only able to view the footer by modifying the DOM in the browser's developer tools. It would be nice if there were a straightforward way to access the footer.

ramkarthikk 6mo ago
Thank you for the detailed feedback. I'm glad you like this project. 1. Yeah, there are definitely more blogs. Seems like an issue paginating and fetching it at build time. I will check this. 2. I generally don't prefer infinite scroll but since people are used to it on social media, I kept it on the modern version. It does make it impossible to see the footer. I will figure out a way around this. In the meantime, the "Submit" page should display the footer. I'm also going to add search to the minimal version since I also prefer it over the modern version and search is useful.
- sphars 6mo ago
  Regarding the infinite scroll with the footer, I like the path Valve has taken with the Steam store homepage. The footer is part of the infinite scroll, as in, when you reach the footer, the infinite scroll continues.
- alsetmusic 6mo ago

dalmo3 6mo ago

TBH I'd love to see that idea as a /blogs list here at HN.

freetonik 6mo ago

Very cool! Love the minimal design a lot, unsurprisingly. My Minifeed [1] started with a similar goal of having a "HN for blogs", but then it grew to include search, related recommendations, custom feeds, lists, etc. I don't have categories though. [1] https://minifeed.net/ https://minifeed.net/

evanjrowley 6mo ago

Addition of a "Dark Mode" button would be much appreciated!

zahlman 6mo ago

> Minimal (HN-inspired, fast, static): https://text.blogosphere.app/ https://text.blogosphere.app/ Could you add a form submission button next to the filter, so that it doesn't require JavaScript? (Or actually that can probably be done easily enough with some kind of CSS variable-setting trick...?)

getaid 6mo ago

Cool project.

sourcegrift 6mo ago

"A woman had sex with identical twins and now it's impossible to tell who is the father", is this a blog post or news or sarcastic news or what the hell

gray_wolf_99 6mo ago

Great idea!

Johnny_Bonk 6mo ago

One recommendation is to keep header fixed on scroll so you can always nav away. most sites fail to do this it seems

mm263 6mo ago
Fixed header isn't always a good thing, it can also be a mistake. Since content is the product, let the content take up all available space and use your browser navigation capabilities to navigate if necessary

zephyrwhimsy 6mo ago

[flagged]

holtwick 6mo ago

Small web, try this one https://bubbles.town https://bubbles.town

viermalbe 6mo ago
Bubbles is different, because the front page is created by real people voting. It also supports comments, blogs in EN and DE, as well as following blogs.

givemeethekeys 6mo ago

This is a great idea. I think you should ask people to pay a subscription for commenting. Turn it into a community supported site from the get go!

skeptrune 6mo ago

This is awesome! I'm happy someone made this exist.

ashwinne 6mo ago

I would love a old-school search engine that pulls results purely from a well curated list of websites and blogs.

swyx 6mo ago
https://kagi.com/smallweb/ https://kagi.com/smallweb/

blue_hex 6mo ago

i can't describe how happy this project makes me feel. Honestly, i don't even know why. I mean, the idea is great but it's nothing "extra", still it just feels right. Like breath of fresh air.

quanwinn 6mo ago

Love this! Was the UI done with Claude or some LLM? Not a critique, just curious because the designs give off that vibe to me.

rodarima 6mo ago

Amazing that the minimal version works in Dillo, except for the categories menu which uses JS (using a form and submit button inside a noscript tag would work as a fallback).

nelsonfigueroa 6mo ago

Ooooh I love these indie web aggregators. I wrote about some of my favorite ones here if anyone's curious: https://nelson.cloud/how-i-discover-new-blogs/ https://nelson.cloud/how-i-discover-new-blogs/. But here are some of my fav ways to discover blogs: - https://minifeed.net/welcome https://minifeed.net/welcome - https://indieblog.page/ https://indieblog.page/ - https://1mb.club/ https://1mb.club/ - https://512kb.club/ https://512kb.club/ - https://250kb.club/ https://250kb.club/

busymom0 6mo ago
I'd like to submit my own aggregator to your list: https://limereader.com/ https://limereader.com/ It aggregates the top articles on STEAMD topics (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math, and Design) from various forums and displays them in chronological order. This includes forums like Hacker News, Tildes, Lobsters, Slashdot, Bear, and some science, tech & programming related subreddits. You can read more here: https://limereader.com/about https://limereader.com/about
rahkiin 6mo ago
I should create an aggregator aggregator
eleventen 6mo ago
A few more: - https://powrss.com/ https://powrss.com/ - https://blogroll.org/ https://blogroll.org/ - https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/

landdate 6mo ago

This is awesome. I find myself seeking out blogs nowadays as many of the best forums have died out and reddit has dropped in quality significantly. I typically use marginalia and wiby to make finding posts from blogs easier, but I like the idea of providing hn style mechanics to blog posts, so many of which lack the ability to comment/discuss the material. At the same time, while I think this is a useful tool, I am a little weary of the aggregation and consolidation of the web.

KronisLV 6mo ago

Vaguely related, I did an extremely basic RSS feed combiner ages ago: https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/ https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/ when there was that one post where people could share their blogs and many of those had RSS feeds. That said, it got its list of feeds from the repo that someone made which hasn't been updated in a few years, so even if new blog content gets pulled, the list of blogs doesn't change. Oh well, wasn't a super serious project.

glerk 6mo ago

Sweet! Glad to see so many active personal blogs. We should push to bring back RSS feeds somehow. I really miss that era.

janiecewhite 6mo ago

[dead]

musasaabi 6mo ago

[dead]

rpgbr 6mo ago

Very cool! We have something similar — asort of “planet” — for personal blogs in Brazil. It's open source, maybe it can be useful for someone: https://github.com/manualdousuario/lerama https://github.com/manualdousuario/lerama Our instance: https://lerama.pcdomanual.com https://lerama.pcdomanual.com

boxedemp 6mo ago

Very cool!! It's actually full of blogs! I've seen lots of claims for this kind of thing, glad to see you followed through!

millionclicks 6mo ago

Awesome idea. You should launch this on Buildfeed.co.

matheusmoreira 6mo ago

> If you don't find your blog, please add them. > RSS / Atom Feed URL * I really need to implement an RSS/Atom feed in my static site generator, the lack of this feature is really starting to hurt. I can probably get Claude to help me with this.

dllu 6mo ago
I vibe coded RSS feed for my static site generator a few months ago: https://github.com/dllu/dllup-rs/blob/main/src/main.rs#L850 https://github.com/dllu/dllup-rs/blob/main/src/main.rs#L850 and was pleasantly surprised to see my blog was already on this website!

stevenicr 6mo ago

I see the footer, then it disappears - (next scroll kicks in) - see foot, disappears, repeat.. (desktop, firefox) It's time we bring back webrings and optional auto-check for recip links - with options to check for nofollow and do a thing or not. Webring code anyone can self host - have notification and approval and accept nofollow links as okay by default should work fine. Thinking of them getting bigger, might need to give surfers and option to sort by tags / categories / newest / oldest. have option for website owner to prioritize or highlight a few as first seen each month..

OpFour 6mo ago

I made something similar, but for Linux news and information! thelinuxreport.com :D

jadbox 6mo ago

No voting? How is it curated?

paulpauper 6mo ago

"All submissions are manually reviewed before appearing in the directory." it's like the late 90s early 2000s again

rav3ndust 6mo ago

cool stuff. have already found and bookmarked a few interesting sites just going through the list. submitted my own blog there as well. it is cool seeing human-curated directories coming back (not that they truly left, but i've been seeing more and more over the last few years around the 'indie web') i do a little something like this on my own site, but it is just a simple directory of sites that i like listed by category on a single page.

BLACKCRAB 6mo ago

[dead]

ddingus 6mo ago

I love this. THANK YOU.

zephyrwhimsy 6mo ago

[flagged]

aavci 6mo ago

I love the idea of such frontpages. There should be one for small scale b2c apps as well to help discovery

sehgalmayank001 6mo ago

[dead]

xkbear89 6mo ago

[flagged]

meander_water 6mo ago

Cool idea! I actually did something similar but with ~130k Substack publications (they're just RSS feeds) https://findsubstack.com https://findsubstack.com

414techie 6mo ago

This is a very useful project. Thank you for taking it on! I just spent at least 30 minutes reading instead of mindless scrolling. This reminded me of the good feelings I had when I first used the web. The content is novel and written for the authors enjoyment. The web was better for people then and you just recreated that. I like the minimal version better, but it is hard to use on mobile. If there was a way that you could make a minimal version with better accessibility and larger fonts, I’d use that. Until then, I’ve bookmarked the modern version.

yuppiepuppie 6mo ago

I like this new found indie web resurgence! A few months someone posted a directory of blogs, I ended up building https://hnarcade.com https://hnarcade.com and now this :) Discovery still remains a problem - besides this post on HN how do you plan to get people to visit the site and discover new posts? I started a newsletter to help with this, but keen to hear ideas.

zephyrwhimsy 6mo ago

[flagged]

rafayexalter 6mo ago

nice, what stack did you use?

londonanon 6mo ago

Thank you for making this, the Internet needs more of these. The young ones among us are likely still scratching their heads whilst trying to understand what RSS is...this puts it all together in a neat little package ala Kagi, Blogroll, etc. Good ol' directory-style.

RikiGohain 6mo ago

its great

carte_blanche 6mo ago

Looks nice! It's getting hard to keep up with all the recent posts on indie web aggregators (a good problem to have!). I've observed that I always get excited about seeing one such tool -> try to make it a habit to visit those aggregators occasionally -> forget about them -> rinse and repeat. A great execution on the problem of discovery within the blogosphere is Wander, which was posted here a few days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422759. I discover great, small websites not because I found them in any aggregator's list, but more often via someone whose opinions I trust recommended a particular post to me. Wander executes on that idea rather brilliantly. I've found myself going to my Wander console[^1] more regularly now and I keep finding great folks to follow. [^1]: https://www.siddharthagolu.com/wander/ https://www.siddharthagolu.com/wander/

xtiansimon 6mo ago

I see it’s possible to subscribe to RSS from the app, but I can’t find the link on the website.

Discoaaron 6mo ago

Love these, please default to follow system theme

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

oortcrate_1 6mo ago

[dead]

unvalley 6mo ago

I like this kind of idea. Do you require RSS for the listed blogs? curious about the behind.

rallypi 6mo ago

[flagged]

zhichuanxun 6mo ago

[dead]

Grokify 6mo ago

That's a great idea and a very nice project. It's great that to move back to curated blog lists from thoughtful authors. I've been doing something similar specific to my interests so far. Will check yours out. Here's my "Planet AI": https://grokify.github.io/planet-ai/ https://grokify.github.io/planet-ai/ And some selected article/discussion analysis: https://grokify.github.io/frontierpulse/ https://grokify.github.io/frontierpulse/

iiikbh 5mo ago

Amazing , I think LiveKit will handle many things also with that, Great job!

manuelr-t 5mo ago

Really like the rss feature

danielszlaski 6mo ago

Nice and clean.

tombert 6mo ago

Interesting. I submitted mine.

chistev 6mo ago

Great job. Submitted my blog.

ramkarthikk 6mo ago
Thank you. I approved your blog. Quick note: It looks like your feed items don't have published date which makes it hard to store and sort recent posts.
- chistev 6mo ago
  >Thank you. I approved your blog. Can't find it. > It looks like your feed items don't have published date which makes it hard to store and sort recent posts Okay, you mean the RSS feed?

the_axiom 6mo ago

[flagged]

notachatbot123 6mo ago
I would recommend deleting it, reading up on fascism and psychology and trying to fix whatever makes you prone to extremism in a different way that radicalism and hate.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
nextaccountic 6mo ago
The OP doesn't need to approve every blog that is submitted

obsidianbases1 6mo ago

Something like this is very much needed. I hope to see more things like this. What would be really cool is if there was a personalized algorithm (for you page) that stored data and processed locally.

ramkarthikk 6mo ago
Thank you. I wanted to mostly stay away from algorithmic feed to stay true to RSS. On the non-minimal version of the site, you can sign up and follow blogs to have a "For You" tab, but it's still recent posts from blogs you follow.
- Miraltar 6mo ago
  Instead or in addition to following blogs, what I'd love to have is a way to filter out those I don't like.
  - obsidianbases1 6mo ago
    Local keyword exclusions (to keep the server requirement minimal) might be pretty high impact.

ramraj07 6mo ago

give people the ability to curate their own collections and publish them

ramkarthikk 6mo ago
On the non-minimal version, you can signup for an account and follow blogs (curate your fav blogs). I will add an option to making your list public.

Hard_Space 6mo ago

Incredible that we are regressing back to webrings and hand-curated lists like this, both of which I remember well. That's not a criticism! I guess that the quality-drop in search wasn't quite enough to make it happen, but the advent of AI content predomination will be.

blackbrokkoli 6mo ago
Do you have any idea what killed webrings? It seems to be simply a great idea...like...should we bring it back? Could we?
- Mezzie 6mo ago
  Search. There was some overlap between the webring age and the early search age, but once search became entrenched and useful, webrings faded. Blogrolls survived for a little bit longer, but it was search. Specifically, once search became the way you found the first page/site to begin with. Before search as default, you found sites in a bunch of scattershot ways: advertisements, word of mouth, lists in books, or lists on websites that updated periodically (that you had to have found/heard about one of the other ways) for example. Then you crawled out from there because that was the only way to find things. You had to either know the URL or use a link. And not all of the links/sites in the webrings were good. Once search got good enough, people found the initial site via search and instead of taking their time clicking through a webring which might at any point lead them somewhere dead or useless, it was quicker to go back to the search page to find something else. Page access went from being a chained together web of back and forth links to a 2 step process of search -> page.
- manuelmoreale 6mo ago
  Webrings are very much still a thing and Ray has an awesome page on his site all about them https://brisray.com/utils/webrings.htm https://brisray.com/utils/webrings.htm
voxleone 6mo ago
We're heading to a future where (when) friction is a luxury. Anyways, I thank the organizers for the rare opportunity. Long live Blogosphere.app, long live blogs.

ml- 6mo ago

Nice job. A small suggestion, unless I completely missed it, an option to filter by post / blog language.

ramkarthikk 6mo ago
Great feedback. I will add search to this minimal version. The non-minimal version comes with search. Filter by language is something neither has and will be a great addition.

setnone 6mo ago

This is great. I'm curious what's your vision on adding comments?

ramkarthikk 6mo ago
If you're referring to comments on the website, I plan to keep it minimal (the text version is a static site). If you're referring to comments on blogs in general, I have many thoughts. Back in the day, comments used to be how you connected with people and let other people find you. It also came with spam (spam plugins could only do so much). With the rise of static site generators, most people don't have comments on their blogs now. It is something I miss though.
- Siecje 6mo ago
  There is cusdis[1] for comments on a static site. 1: https://cusdis.com/ https://cusdis.com/
- AndrewStephens 6mo ago
  I haven’t had comments on my blog for over a decade now and I don’t miss them. For every useful and informative comment I got several spammy or rude reply. Anyone who wants to let me know something about my blog can message me on social media. I’ve seen blogs that do not host comments themselves but instead automatically surface social media (usually mastodon) comments which I think is a useful technique.
  - bookofjoe 6mo ago
    I've had comments (open, anonymous, no screening) on my blog since it started in 2004. Back in the day when it was very popular, most of my blog posts were the result of reader tips/advice/heads-up/etc. I have to work MUCH harder now that comments have pretty much dried up.
  - paulnpace 6mo ago
    > Anyone who wants to let me know something about my blog can message me on social media. But, can they?

SirFatty 6mo ago

Did you use Frontpage to create your frontpage?

reconnecting 6mo ago
<meta name="generator" content="FrontPage 4.0">
- cr125rider 6mo ago
  Then add A BUNCH of extra XML to bloat the page nicely
  - reconnecting 6mo ago
    Back in the day, MS FrontPage was indeed synonymous with nested and unreliable page structure. I wish I could go back and tell them it is nothing compared to what passes for web output in the 21st century.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

postalcoder 6mo ago

If anyone looking for something even more minimalist, give the HN x Small Web RSS feed a try https://hcker.news/feeds/atom?period=day&limit=50&smallweb=true https://hcker.news/feeds/atom?period=day&limit=50&smallweb=t...

mmargenot 6mo ago

Very cool! This was a good impetus to actually add RSS to my blog.

kangraemin 6mo ago

[flagged]

ramkarthikk 6mo ago
Its chronological - most recently published first (no algorithm or voting).
efilife 6mo ago
Don't engage. This is a bot.
- InsideOutSanta 6mo ago
  I wonder how to deal with the growing number of bots on HN. Right now, they are easy to spot, but they're getting better (and maybe I just think I can spot them because of the obvious examples). Maybe a "this is a bot" button, but no doubt that would be abused.
  - cosmicgadget 6mo ago
    Should have to pass a turing test before each comment.

sebastianconcpt 6mo ago

Yeah we need to make curated human signals stronger.

Biologist123 6mo ago

Nice. I can see a version of this working for ever more niche areas. Curated reading lists for areas of interest. At which point a curated list of curated lists becomes viable!

jasoneckert 6mo ago

This is great, thanks! It sort of feels like browsing for gems in a used bookstore and stumbling onto authentic, personal writing. I'm always up for that, and plan on spending plenty of time exploring the list. I’ve submitted mine as well - cheers!

glenstein 6mo ago
>It sort of feels like browsing for gems in a used bookstore and stumbling onto authentic, personal writing I don't know that I've heard a better description of the thing the so-called small web is about than that. It's the clearest answer to the "why" of having a small web of discoverable personal blogs and sites.
ramkarthikk 6mo ago
That is such a lovely way to put it. Do you mind if I add it to the about page and link to this comment?
- jasoneckert 6mo ago
  Of course I don't mind - please do! :-)

nextaccountic 6mo ago

Question, is this strictly chronological, or is there anything at all to make this an "algorithmic feed" like HN, reddit, twitter, or facebook? (list is roughly in the order of less shitty to more shitty, but note that none of them are chronological, unlike, say, a RSS reader aggregating some set of blogs)

ramkarthikk 6mo ago
This is strictly chronological. No voting, no algorithm.

dchuk 6mo ago

Very clean site, well done. I’ve built something similar, but it also has an algorithmic front page option as well based on the “standard” algorithm from Reddit/HN: https://engineered.at https://engineered.at I also have it wired up to gpt nano for topic extraction and summary creation per post, if you register for an account (free) you can also follow sources and topics to fine tune things. I have a big list of features to continue adding to it, like an ability to “claim” your site so you can get some analytics from the site, and potentially to boost your site in the algorithm. Might also add a jobs board. If you’re interested, while this site is closed source, the feed monitoring rails engine is open source: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor

Yokohiii 6mo ago
Not sure if you want feedback on this, but mine is free. The lists are impenetrable for my eye, I think an key mistake is that you don't use an accent color for titles in lists (i.e. look at a google serp). That you don't directly link the content, felt like an offense, followed by a slap in the face looking at an AI generated summary. The layout feels too reddit and too industrialized and the way you plan to progress the project, rings my "pet project to slam ad's on" bells. I think the pure intent of OPs site naturally makes it more approachable and likeable.
- dchuk 6mo ago
  I’ll ignore the tone here and solely reply to the feedback (go take a nice walk or something, no need to be so fired up, it’s just the internet): - noted on the readability call out. Was trying to keep things minimal, similar to HN itself, I’ll see what I can do to make the contrast better - I added the summaries because it’s something I want on sites like this. Every individual article page contains a direct link to the original site. I’m intentionally not rendering the full article content like a feed reader so that a gist/teaser is available for users to hopefully send them to the original article. - you are free to not use the site if you think my intent is nefarious, again it’s just the internet after all

lemiffe 6mo ago

Great idea! Could you add a "music" category please for blogs?

LostMyLogin 6mo ago

Love this! New homepage for me. Do you have a buy me coffee button to help keep it live?

glenstein 6mo ago
Right! My concern with these tools is sometimes they are too good for this world and likely to live a few months.
ramkarthikk 6mo ago
Appreciate it :) I don't have one. This is hosted on Cloudflare as a static site and a cron that runs on a $5 VM (that also hosts other things). So it doesn't cost me much to keep it alive other than the domain cost. I built it this way intentionally so that I can keep this running forever.

glenstein 6mo ago

Love this! I very much appreciate the inclusion of a lightweight version, as I think lightweight discovery for blogs and the small web is where good tools and apps are needed. Also, given that the lightweight version is very hn styled format it naturally leads my brain to imagining a version with upvotes and commenters (which may be a good or a bad thing) but with the link submission part automated. Not necessarily the intent here but it was the first time that particular combination of possibilities occurred to me as a way to do things. Also curious about how these blogs are indexed/reviewed. Is the list ever pruned over time due to inactivity?

ramkarthikk 6mo ago
Thank you. The initial list was from blogroll.org (mentioned in the about page, and I emailed the person who built that). From then on, I review every submission that happens via the form. The scheduler flags blogs that fail and doesn't try to fetch after a few tries. I'm still working on an effective way to re-review and prune. Open to any feedback.
- thesuitonym 6mo ago
  I'd say a periodic job that looks at the last update of all your blogs, and removes those that haven't updated in over a year would be generally agreeable. If you want to be exceptionally kind, you can also email the submitter and tell them their blog has been removed due to inactivity, so they'll remember to submit if they start blogging again.
- glenstein 6mo ago
  I suppose my dream would be that the protocolization of this from back in the day gets revived in some way. Like a google pagecrawl style index built up from blogrolls (though I don't know if the blogroll itself was ever literally protocol-ized), combined with some checking of RSS feeds for activity. Or webrings, or something else. Though in some respects these are less smart than what you're already doing, but I would like to think there's an elegant way to make an index emerge organically to minimize the editorial burden of any one person.

bovermyer 6mo ago

There's also this: https://minifeed.net/global https://minifeed.net/global However, I think (text.)Blogosphere has a nicer interface, personally. Maybe I'm just used to HN.

Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago

Yes!! I found a new website to use :-) I just hope if you can add dark-mode, I use hackernews essential which adds dark mode and more features which I really like in hackernews, Perhaps something like this can be added but overall I really like it! You have (essentially) just made something which I imagined 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41789661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41789661: Ask HN: Are you interested in a Hacker News alternative which doesnt focus on AI (Oct 9 2024) My point, which has only grown to an even larger degree is that Hackernews has too many AI discussions, which both feels a bit fomo to me and also I am seeing AI generated blog posts and comments now on Hackernews as well. At some point, I want a website where I can talk about the more human aspects, some occasional AI mention is fine but not if a quarter or half of front page is hackernews and some genuinely nice projects don't get the attention :( I had joined hackernews to read those content pieces and fell in love with the human discussion aspect but now there are definitely moments of browsing hackernews which makes me feel as to what I had written in the ask HN my last line within the ask HN was: I just want people who don't want the latest ai hype to gather around and discuss some other cool things which are "not" AI. This kind of fits into that Adding my submissions of blog-posts into it in sometime :) See you there!

rednafi 6mo ago

This is great. But I’ve bookmarked at least 10 of these aggregators over the years, and I never revisit any of them. Partly because I don’t have the time to browse and discover new content. I also don’t read the blog spam from prolific writers who pop up here every two days, especially the low-quality ones constantly yapping about AI. So the number of blogs I revisit is a handful, and I have a page on my site listing them [1]. Some of the blogs I’ve listed also have backlinks to my site. It’s super simple and works fairly well for me. Plus there’s rss. [1]: https://rednafi.com/blogroll/ https://rednafi.com/blogroll/

efilife 6mo ago

This doesn't have an RSS feed? bummer

gorfian_robot 6mo ago
yeah +12 if it had an rss feed
- ramkarthikk 6mo ago
  It's the next item on the list I plan to add. Likely will be adding it today.

Kye 6mo ago

Variety! I appreciate that it's not all tech writing from tech blogs from people in tech like almost every blog list/aggregator thing on HN.

arrty88 6mo ago

super dope. now make it infinite scroll and put ads all over the place! /s

joenot443 6mo ago

I love it. I'd love a search bar and maybe a means to sort by popularity (however you define it.) I like that it's free and clean and direct; I hope it remains that way!

BrokenCogs 6mo ago

Now please build a frontpage for all the frontpages on blogs

colejhudson 6mo ago

Lovely! Those who enjoy this might also like: - https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb - https://blogroll.org/ https://blogroll.org/ - https://minifeed.net/welcome https://minifeed.net/welcome - https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/

peterspath 6mo ago
https://powrss.com https://powrss.com and https://slashpages.net https://slashpages.net is also a nice way to discover new blogs...

bryanhogan 6mo ago

Any plans on adding a way to filter out "lower quality" posts which usually dominate chronologically sorted post lists? And, possibly a way to filter type of content more in-depth than just one category?

ramkarthikk 6mo ago
No plans to add a filter for "lower quality" since that takes away from the ethos of RSS. Certainly looking to add more ways to filter. Open to ideas.
- kypro 6mo ago
  It's refreshing to to see something intentionally uncurated. I think "low quality" content has it's place. A lot of my favourite blogs back in the day could be considered "low quality", but for whatever reason I liked them and read their stuff... Same was true of my own blog. It wasn't particularly high quality but back then even a lowish quality blog would still occasionally be surfaced on Google if the right key words were searched for. I miss this about modern YouTube too... I used to love watching content from small creators even if their content was "lower quality", but it's so hard to discover that type of content today. Everywhere you go there is an algorithm pushing you towards larger and more professional creators. And that can be fine, but it's nice to have some balance.
  - BizarroLand 6mo ago
    If you think about it, Shakespeare's first poem was probably crap. If his entire career were judged from that, then we wouldn't have Hamlet.
  - krapp 6mo ago
    "quality" is something you care about if you want to virtue signal your professional or intellectual capability, usually as part of a monetization scheme. Hacker News cares so much about quality because this forum is attached to a billion dollar startup incubator, and for many people here their persona is business. Posting on substack is business for most people. Posting on medium is business for most people. "Quality" is just another kind of influencer culture. Writing blogs shouldn't be about marketing and reading blogs shouldn't be about maximizing information density. The vast vast majority of blogs on the old web that everyone yearns to return to weren't "high quality." You were just writing about whatever, likely in a style that would get you downvoted on HN for being insufficiently substantive, and if you were lucky someone else might read it. I wouldn't even call it "low quality" so much as "non-commercial."

alc010 6mo ago

[flagged]

_HMCB_ 6mo ago

Superb! Thank you. Psychologically, the minimal version feels perfect; as if it were more connected with the spirit of blogging.

sodapopcan 6mo ago

Very nice, this is great! Love that you give the two UX options. FYI (bug report): In the non-minimal version, navigating by category is janky in FireFox. The logo briefly disappears with the nav jumping up in its place every time you click a category.

ramkarthikk 6mo ago
Ah, thank you. I will check this.
- sodapopcan 6mo ago
  Just following up to say "You fixed it!" :)

wonger_ 6mo ago

FWIW hackr.news has a smallweb filter: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true But kudos for different people working on similar good ideas

napolux 6mo ago

scoring will bring spam and voting brigades if not managed properly

AnonyMD 6mo ago

It's a very modern and clean design.

highspeedbus 6mo ago

That's great. I wish we could convince more people to use similar tools regularly, myself included. It may not 'scale' as well as algorithmic feeds, but maybe that's what will save the Web. We need more sweat and passion, both in curation of content and in the effort to find it.

robertheadley 6mo ago

Great concept, I miss the ability to like things though.

robertheadley 6mo ago
ah, looks like the .app version covers that. I will have to check it out outside of work.

siva7 6mo ago

This feels so Yahoo-1994. Love that we are getting back to our origins thanks to AI.

bookofjoe 6mo ago
That's so funny: I just reactivated my Yahoo email address.

reedlaw 6mo ago

I've come to the conclusion that Hacker News is the best aggregator out there. Substack knows my interests yet gives terrible recommendations. Youtube constantly recommends the same videos or exaggerates my interest in a topic based on a few views, spamming me with related content until I watch something unrelated. The only downside of Hacker News is that its focus is narrower than other sites. But perhaps because the focus is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting" there is a bias towards things I find interesting with less noise than more commercial offerings.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

l72 6mo ago

I always thought the "planets"[1][2][3] were a neat idea. I wish there were more of them for dedicated topics. Then I can just subscribe to specific planets which pulls curated feeds from various blogs on that topic. [1] Planet Gnome: https://planet.gnome.org/ https://planet.gnome.org/ [2] Planet Debian: https://planet.debian.org/ https://planet.debian.org/ [3] Planet GNU: https://planet.gnu.org/ https://planet.gnu.org/

8organicbits 6mo ago
I've been building an index of planets and related projects. There's a lot, especially for technical topics, but I also wish there were more. Ctrl-F for planet: https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/blogrolls/ https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/blogrolls/ There's an older list at https://web.archive.org/web/20170823064412/http://planetplanet.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170823064412/http://planetplan...

notanormalnerd 6mo ago

Hahahahha... I was trying to build something like this for a while. Seems like I wasn't the only one with this idea. So happy someone finally did it!

gorbiesRedScar 6mo ago

perfect.

riceballs_tlp 6mo ago

How do you curate the blogs that are being added to this? I see that there's a way to submit your own blog, but was there a list you started with initially? Thanks for making this!

gosingk 6mo ago

Nice project

akshitgaur2005 6mo ago

Hey, I am just getting started with blogging, could/should I submit my website too?

tpemist 6mo ago

Thanks for sharing, it's a great idea! but the site is not reachable now, it stuck.

trvz 6mo ago

This is silly. RSS readers exist. Feed a Fever was even better.