Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs - Comments

Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs

chistev

Great job.

Submitted my blog.

ramkarthikk

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.

the_axiom

What if I have a personal handwritten blog but it has nazist content?

notachatbot123

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.

nextaccountic

The OP doesn't need to approve every blog that is submitted

obsidianbases1

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

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.

ramraj07

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

ramkarthikk

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

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.

nate

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.

avanwyk

I wouldn't even call this a regression. Hand curated and edited feels like the future I want right now.

coldpie

> 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.

renegat0x0

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.

Link to my repo:

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

blackbrokkoli

Do you have any idea what killed webrings?

It seems to be simply a great idea...like...should we bring it back? Could we?

voxleone

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.

sailfast

[delayed]

sehgalmayank001

Webrings didn't fail because the idea was bad. They got buried under SEO and social feeds. Now that both of those are broken, hand curation starts to look less like a step backward and more like the only thing that was ever actually working.

ml-

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

ramkarthikk

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

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

ramkarthikk

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.

AndrewStephens

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.

SirFatty

Did you use Frontpage to create your frontpage?

reconnecting

<meta name="generator" content="FrontPage 4.0">

postalcoder

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=t...

randusername

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.

mmargenot

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

kangraemin

[flagged]

ramkarthikk

Its chronological - most recently published first (no algorithm or voting).

efilife

Don't engage. This is a bot.

sebastianconcpt

Yeah we need to make curated human signals stronger.

Biologist123

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

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

>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

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?

nextaccountic

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

This is strictly chronological. No voting, no algorithm.

dchuk

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.

If you’re interested, while this site is closed source, the feed monitoring rails engine is open source: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor

Yokohiii

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.

lemiffe

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

danielszlaski

Nice and clean.

LostMyLogin

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

glenstein

Right! My concern with these tools is sometimes they are too good for this world and likely to live a few months.

ramkarthikk

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

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

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.

bovermyer

There's also this: https://minifeed.net/global

However, I think (text.)Blogosphere has a nicer interface, personally. Maybe I'm just used to HN.

Imustaskforhelp

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: 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

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/

efilife

This doesn't have an RSS feed? bummer

gorfian_robot

yeah +12 if it had an rss feed

Kye

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

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

joenot443

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

Now please build a frontpage for all the frontpages on blogs

colejhudson
peterspath

https://powrss.com

and https://slashpages.net is also a nice way to discover new blogs...

bryanhogan

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

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.

alc010

[dead]

_HMCB_

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

sodapopcan

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

Ah, thank you. I will check this.

wonger_

FWIW hackr.news has a smallweb filter: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true

But kudos for different people working on similar good ideas

napolux

scoring will bring spam and voting brigades if not managed properly

AnonyMD

It's a very modern and clean design.

highspeedbus

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

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

robertheadley

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

siva7

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

bookofjoe

That's so funny: I just reactivated my Yahoo email address.

reedlaw

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.

l72

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/

[2] Planet Debian: https://planet.debian.org/

[3] Planet GNU: https://planet.gnu.org/

8organicbits

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/

There's an older list at https://web.archive.org/web/20170823064412/http://planetplan...

notanormalnerd

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!

tombert

Interesting. I submitted mine.

gorbiesRedScar

perfect.

riceballs_tlp

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

Nice project

akshitgaur2005

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

tpemist

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

trvz

This is silly.

RSS readers exist. Feed a Fever was even better.

ronb1964

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!

susam

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 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 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/ 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

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.

dalmo3

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

freetonik

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/

evanjrowley

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

zahlman

> Minimal (HN-inspired, fast, static): 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...?)

sourcegrift

"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

Great idea!

holtwick

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

viermalbe

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.

Johnny_Bonk

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

mm263

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

givemeethekeys

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

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

ashwinne

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

blue_hex

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.

rodarima

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

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/.

But here are some of my fav ways to discover blogs:

- https://minifeed.net/welcome

- https://indieblog.page/

- https://1mb.club/

- https://512kb.club/

- https://250kb.club/

busymom0

I'd like to submit my own aggregator to your list:

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

rahkiin

I should create an aggregator aggregator

eleventen
landdate

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

Vaguely related, I did an extremely basic RSS feed combiner ages ago: 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

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

rpgbr

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

Our instance: https://lerama.pcdomanual.com

boxedemp

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

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

quanwinn

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.

matheusmoreira

> 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

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

and was pleasantly surprised to see my blog was already on this website!

stevenicr

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

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

jadbox

No voting? How is it curated?

paulpauper

"All submissions are manually reviewed before appearing in the directory."

it's like the late 90s early 2000s again

rav3ndust

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.

ddingus

I love this. THANK YOU.

aavci

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

chistev

Great job.

Submitted my blog.

ramkarthikk

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.

the_axiom

What if I have a personal handwritten blog but it has nazist content?

notachatbot123

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.

nextaccountic

The OP doesn't need to approve every blog that is submitted

obsidianbases1

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

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.

ramraj07

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

ramkarthikk

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

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.

nate

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.

avanwyk

I wouldn't even call this a regression. Hand curated and edited feels like the future I want right now.

coldpie

> 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.

renegat0x0

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.

Link to my repo:

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

blackbrokkoli

Do you have any idea what killed webrings?

It seems to be simply a great idea...like...should we bring it back? Could we?

voxleone

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.

sailfast

[delayed]

sehgalmayank001

Webrings didn't fail because the idea was bad. They got buried under SEO and social feeds. Now that both of those are broken, hand curation starts to look less like a step backward and more like the only thing that was ever actually working.

ml-

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

ramkarthikk

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

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

ramkarthikk

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.

AndrewStephens

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.

SirFatty

Did you use Frontpage to create your frontpage?

reconnecting

<meta name="generator" content="FrontPage 4.0">

postalcoder

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=t...

randusername

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.

mmargenot

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

kangraemin

[flagged]

ramkarthikk

Its chronological - most recently published first (no algorithm or voting).

efilife

Don't engage. This is a bot.

sebastianconcpt

Yeah we need to make curated human signals stronger.

Biologist123

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

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

>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

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?

nextaccountic

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

This is strictly chronological. No voting, no algorithm.

dchuk

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.

If you’re interested, while this site is closed source, the feed monitoring rails engine is open source: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor

Yokohiii

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.

lemiffe

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

danielszlaski

Nice and clean.

LostMyLogin

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

glenstein

Right! My concern with these tools is sometimes they are too good for this world and likely to live a few months.

ramkarthikk

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

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

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.

bovermyer

There's also this: https://minifeed.net/global

However, I think (text.)Blogosphere has a nicer interface, personally. Maybe I'm just used to HN.

Imustaskforhelp

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: 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

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/

efilife

This doesn't have an RSS feed? bummer

gorfian_robot

yeah +12 if it had an rss feed

Kye

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

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

joenot443

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

Now please build a frontpage for all the frontpages on blogs

colejhudson
peterspath

https://powrss.com

and https://slashpages.net is also a nice way to discover new blogs...

bryanhogan

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

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.

alc010

[dead]

_HMCB_

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

sodapopcan

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

Ah, thank you. I will check this.

wonger_

FWIW hackr.news has a smallweb filter: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true

But kudos for different people working on similar good ideas

napolux

scoring will bring spam and voting brigades if not managed properly

AnonyMD

It's a very modern and clean design.

highspeedbus

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

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

robertheadley

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

siva7

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

bookofjoe

That's so funny: I just reactivated my Yahoo email address.

reedlaw

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.

l72

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/

[2] Planet Debian: https://planet.debian.org/

[3] Planet GNU: https://planet.gnu.org/

8organicbits

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/

There's an older list at https://web.archive.org/web/20170823064412/http://planetplan...

notanormalnerd

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!

tombert

Interesting. I submitted mine.

gorbiesRedScar

perfect.

riceballs_tlp

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

Nice project

akshitgaur2005

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

tpemist

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

trvz

This is silly.

RSS readers exist. Feed a Fever was even better.

ronb1964

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!

susam

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 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 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/ 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

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.

dalmo3

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

freetonik

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/

evanjrowley

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

zahlman

> Minimal (HN-inspired, fast, static): 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...?)

sourcegrift

"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

Great idea!

holtwick

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

viermalbe

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.

Johnny_Bonk

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

mm263

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

givemeethekeys

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

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

ashwinne

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

blue_hex

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.

rodarima

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

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/.

But here are some of my fav ways to discover blogs:

- https://minifeed.net/welcome

- https://indieblog.page/

- https://1mb.club/

- https://512kb.club/

- https://250kb.club/

busymom0

I'd like to submit my own aggregator to your list:

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

rahkiin

I should create an aggregator aggregator

eleventen
landdate

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

Vaguely related, I did an extremely basic RSS feed combiner ages ago: 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

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

rpgbr

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

Our instance: https://lerama.pcdomanual.com

boxedemp

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

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

quanwinn

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.

matheusmoreira

> 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

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

and was pleasantly surprised to see my blog was already on this website!

stevenicr

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

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

jadbox

No voting? How is it curated?

paulpauper

"All submissions are manually reviewed before appearing in the directory."

it's like the late 90s early 2000s again

rav3ndust

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.

ddingus

I love this. THANK YOU.

aavci

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