Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs

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.

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

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.

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/

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?

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/

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!

Lovely!

Those who enjoy this might also like:

- https://kagi.com/smallweb

- https://blogroll.org/

- https://minifeed.net/welcome

- https://ooh.directory/

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

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.

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/

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..

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.

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

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.

> 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...?)

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

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/

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

> 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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

Did you use Frontpage to create your frontpage?

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!

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).

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.

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

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

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!

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

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

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!

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!

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.

I love this. THANK YOU.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No voting? How is it curated?

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

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

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

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

Yeah we need to make curated human signals stronger.

It's a very modern and clean design.

"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

Interesting. I submitted mine.

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

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

scoring will bring spam and voting brigades if not managed properly

Great job.

Submitted my blog.

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

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...

Great idea!

Nice and clean.

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

But kudos for different people working on similar good ideas

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!

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.

This doesn't have an RSS feed? bummer

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!

Cool project.

Nice project

perfect.

This is silly.

RSS readers exist. Feed a Fever was even better.

Now please build a frontpage for all the frontpages on blogs

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.

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

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

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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!