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?
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
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.
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.
> Incredible that we are regressing back to webrings and hand-curated lists like this
One of these hand-curated blog aggregator websites pops up on HN about every month. They're cool and good on the author for trying to solve the problem, but it seems like the wrong approach to me. They're too disorganized, a random collection of mostly tech- and politics-related writing from random people with zero way to vet the quality of the writing. They also require the creator/owner to care about the project for the long-term, which is unlikely. I never revisit the aggregators.
I wonder if webrings are a better fix here. The low-tech version could be to put a static-URL page on my blog that links to other blogs I like, with a short description. Then people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
Maybe a clever person could come up with some kind of higher-tech version that could present a more interesting & consistent interface to users, encourage blogs to link back to each other, and also solve the dead-link problem.
I think we're going to reinvent Google's "circles" mechanism from G+. We all (well, the terminally online, at least) are going to be part of several more or less overlapping villages, and the people in those villages are going to trust each other to not be bad faith actors. Everything else... everything that tries to scale... everything public... wasteland.
Something something Dunbar's number, Tragedy of the commons.
Couldn't you technically crawl all these blogs for their "blog's I'm reading" and create a social graph? You could start vetting based on how often other blogs link to that one, sort of like an impact factor in research.
Similarly, I feel like book publishers are about to become a thriving business soon again. With any book being most likely just a bot creation, trusting "Random House" sounds like a thing more of us will start paying attention to to make sure we're buying a human made thing.
I follow awesome lists. These are curated lists of software. It reverts google indexing, because search is awful.
About personal blogs... I have many many personal blogs in my repository. Around 4k. Respository below. The real problem is to find quality stuff.
You can have millions of them, but if they are not worth my time, then what is the point?
I cannot verify and decide what is good manually.
Obviously.
I think we cannot also rely on Google to provide rating, nor any corporation.
So I have my own ratings, because at least I will be able to find what I found worth before.
This is the kind of thing I wish existed 10 years ago. The discoverability problem for personal blogs is real — you either get zero readers or you have to play the SEO game. How do you handle ranking? Chronological, or some kind of voting?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
One of these hand-curated blog aggregator websites pops up on HN about every month. They're cool and good on the author for trying to solve the problem, but it seems like the wrong approach to me. They're too disorganized, a random collection of mostly tech- and politics-related writing from random people with zero way to vet the quality of the writing. They also require the creator/owner to care about the project for the long-term, which is unlikely. I never revisit the aggregators.
I wonder if webrings are a better fix here. The low-tech version could be to put a static-URL page on my blog that links to other blogs I like, with a short description. Then people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
Maybe a clever person could come up with some kind of higher-tech version that could present a more interesting & consistent interface to users, encourage blogs to link back to each other, and also solve the dead-link problem.
Something something Dunbar's number, Tragedy of the commons.
About personal blogs... I have many many personal blogs in my repository. Around 4k. Respository below. The real problem is to find quality stuff. You can have millions of them, but if they are not worth my time, then what is the point?
I cannot verify and decide what is good manually. Obviously.
I think we cannot also rely on Google to provide rating, nor any corporation.
So I have my own ratings, because at least I will be able to find what I found worth before.
Link to my repo:
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
I’ve submitted mine as well - cheers!
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.
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.
But moderation and spam are still the hardest problems indeed.
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.
But, can they?
https://hcker.news/feeds/atom?period=day&limit=50&smallweb=t...
Submitted my 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?