How and why to make a /now page on your site | Hacker News Reader

How and why to make a /now page on your site

sive.rs

215 pointssarimkx85 comments

Just use good old /about or equivalent. For most people who aren’t thinking about their website every day, /now will inevitably end up as “what I was doing when I last remembered I have a /now page” instead of what they’re actually doing now.

Idea for the future: in a few years, check how many /now pages were last updated in May 2024.

I host mine on (the rather very good) omg.lol and they send me a weekly reminder via email... I can even update it by replying to the email using markdown

https://darreninthe.net/now

For every Derek Sivers there are 9999 people who don't even care to update their website on a yearly basis.

I use a jekyll/CI/static hosting workflow, and even though I make a zillion git commits a day, somehow branching, editing, PRing, and merging one to my website seems like friction. I have a 4-5 posts in my head I want to make that have been languishing for weeks/months because it feels like too much of a hassle.

I'm thinking of moving to a wordpress-backed CMS (that gets ingested by the static page build system) just to remove it, so I can simply type into a box and smash a button.

Why not develop on and push directly to your main branch?

I might break my website and feel like a dumbass. PRs automatically generate a staging site at a unique URL that ends up in my chat that I can preview and sanity check before merge.

this is what i've done. never really broke the site in a way that i couldn't easily roll back and fix, and that was rare. what really slowed me down was messing up my local ruby installation because i really don't know anything about ruby. chatgpt helped me finally fix that though.

Funny, I'm in the same situation; I'm endlessly tinkering, and I feel like I could benefit from documenting some of it on my "blog" if nobody else does, but the friction of cloning to whichever machine I'm on, probably need to update my SSH key in Github because I've moved to another distro, then writing up and trying to keep the high-standard I've tried to for my blog, with quality images, and step-by-step instructions beginners should be able to follow, means I haven't updated it in months, possibly not even this year.

Similar state, ended up with Netlify CMS (now the weirdly-named https://decapcms.org). Still just my repo and static page build process, but I get a basic GUI to make and edit pages.

Wordpress (or some other well-supported CMS) is nice too, because you can edit from anywhere if you're not at your main development PC. I've written & published blog posts in 30 minutes on my phone in the kitchen, including taking and uploading the photos, while waiting for dinner to finish cooking. As with everything we're not getting paid to do, removing friction is key.

What I ended up doing was writing a PHP script that would scrape threads off my Mastodon account that were posted with a specific hashtag, and turn them into threadreader-style static HTML blog posts (with some minor automated massaging to remove hashtags etc). For my scatterbrain, composing and posting a Mastodon thread is a lot lower-stakes than writing a blog post.

Same, I think it’s the context-switching of managing git and writing the post you have in mind.

I’m on the CLI all day, but even just cd’ing into the project directory feels like friction when I want to post something.

I’ve considered a hosted data store with a private submission form, and then that’s what gets ingested into the build system.

Surely if you can get that workflow up and running, it wouldn't be beyond you to automate the process and slap an html form in front of it?

I went through the same loop. For now, I've settled on Ghost, but always have an eye out for something easy to maintain and write on.

I was in exactly the same position but the route I went was a little programme on my server that reads incoming mail to a secret address and crafts a blog post from it

Bingo. I made a /now page a couple years ago, and removed it a couple months ago, rather than pretend I was ever going to update it. It was just the original text I wrote when I made the page. I assume that's the normal case for these pages.

This is a cool idea. I also really like simonw’s TIL feed:

https://til.simonwillison.net/

Like a microblog of little learnings in day-to-day development.

One interesting thing that occurred to me recently is that my personal site (https://amontalenti.com) is more an essay archive and identity verification tool, than it is a “blog” or “microblog.” That is, the timestamps of the content on there are the least interesting thing about it. The most valuable page, for me, is https://amontalenti.com/archive.

As for something like /now, the most fascinating implementation of this is an old friend of mine from college. He and I were both early 2000s bloggers, but he came up with the idea, in 2001 or so, to keep a nearly-daily one sentence personal diary on his blog. He kept that up for the last 20+ years (he is nowadays a CS researcher and inventor in HCI). Very impressive near-daily microblogging habit over a lifetime!

https://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Home/Log

Great examples, thanks for sharing all of them! Love Chris’ real life commits messages. Find them very nice just to get general overview of what was going on in your life at the time.

This is an interesting idea, but like most things it's just going to age. checking nownownow.com for people in the UK with one, the first 2 I picked were updated in 2021 the next 2023. Then I had two that were this month and last.

TBH linking to a twitter or equivalent social media might be better. Or make now now now a more automatic system.

I think I looked at about 6 from the UK and 4 of them had huge headshots at the top which pushed all the information below the fold. Think maybe only two of them were actually had "now" kind of information as well.

>This is an interesting idea, but like most things it's just going to age.

You can use an LLM to extract and summarize data from your social media.

This is like a second law of thermodynamics for communication. You take something that's already pretty low signal and then extract whatever from it and republish some slop you generate from that using a model. Models are then trained on published media and thus the circle continues, with everything trending to sludge over time.

Yup. The majority of people on the planet already have a "now" page, and that is their social media profile.

> The majority of people on the planet already have a "now" page, and that is their social media profile.

You might be right but the people who have personal websites/blogs with enough passion to add a now page are likely to be in the opposite camp, the minority who dislike social media

> are likely to be in the opposite camp

Why do you think so?

Just an observation from following many blogs

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, unless the content of the page was something like "eating a sandwich" which, afaict, is not the purpose. The article author wrote:

> So in 2015, I made a /now page on my website, saying what I’d tell a friend I hadn’t seen in a year.

So the 2021 pages are probably a little out of date, but I think the 2023 and more recent ones should be fine. I think /now is less a Twitter clone and more like an 'About Me' with only the most recent interesting thing you want to say.

To be fair, pretty much nothing has changed in my life in the last 3 years either.

I think it’s a question of timescale.

Twitter, etc.: hours - days

Now page: months - years

About page: decades

I miss the days when we had enough trust, and even more naivety, to have the finger protocol.

For those who didn't know or don't remember what the finger protocol was:

> The program would supply information such as whether a user is currently logged-on, e-mail address, full name etc. As well as standard user information, finger displays the contents of the .project and .plan files in the user's home directory.

The idea of showing a real name, email address and logged in status, without the explicit consent of that person, is completely incompatible with a modern understanding of trust.

But a small protocol to find out what someone is up to, available on demand, well that would be nice.

The key difference between this and something like twitter, is that firstly it's a first class protocol, there isn't a twitter protocol and you can't implement a twitter server and twitter client independently, but more importantly, it's pull not push.

You're not being pushed notifications when someone updates their .project or .plan. You're not being pushed a feed of "recommended users". You simply ask for someone's .plan and get served it.

Can you recreate that functionality with nothing more than HTTP and an index page? Yes, of course, and this is one such attempt, but until we have a simple client, shipped on most machines, where I could simply type the equivalent of "finger jcarmac@id.net", and get back a short burst of a dozen or so lines, then it won't feel the same.

Of course money ruins everything too, it wouldn't be enough to provide such a thing, because people would far too quickly start having space reserved to advertising. There's too many eyeballs leading to too much money chasing those eyeballs.

A handful of academics have a chance to push back and shun someone who tries to advertise on their usenet newsgroup. There's zero chance of that happening to anyone on any new platform now.

Any platform that gets popular enough to "take off" will all too quickly be taken over by people who optimise for eyeballs, monetise those eyeballs and reinvest money into chasing more eyeballs.

And that's a core "problem" with this project and projects like it. It's a social problem, not a technological one. The technology was solved in the 1970s.

If there were 6 billion people on the internet back then it would have been abused. Times weren't better, people weren't better, it's just a numbers game.

Yes, that's what I meant by "A handful of academics had a chance".

I'd disagree about "Times weren't better". The internet of even just 25 years ago was vastly better for many use cases, if your interests aligned with the relatively smaller pool of people on it back then.

Does that make it overall better? Well not really, and I'm not the sort of person who tries desperately to recreate that time through things like neocities, because time marches on and things change.

But it is still worth appreciating what was good about that time, and asking ourselves if there are lessons we can learn about what's changed over time.

Finger literally was the first protocol to be abused on the early internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

Dynamics of a small town versus a large metropolis.

It's just that the small town back then had John Carmack diligently updating his finger profile as he was working on major projects.

I've been thinking about something like this for a while, wondering if it could be a decentralized alternative to social media timelines. I really like the idea of having a /now page with a short public status that you could share with friends and which can be less work to update than writing an entire blog post.

That being said, the "standard" you defined could have been bit more specific in my opinion. If I have multiple friends with /now pages, I would like to read them all in one place. For this RSS would work nicely, maybe with a separate feed from your blog. If you don't want RSS, maybe making the /now page a uniform text-based format would have been better?

Just an opinion on this.

Sounds like you're after something like TWTXT[1]

[1] https://indieweb.org/twtxt

Hehe, I'm actually playing with a similar idea. I'm still trying to figure out how to reduce friction for less tech-savvy users, so have both the ability to plug in your own feed or use the UI on the site.

I wrote about now pages here https://untested.sonnet.io/My+Now+Page

I also made a version of "my life in weeks" https://days.sonnet.io as an excuse for reflection, an excuse to get the bird's eye view of my life, then to encourage others to do something similar. And, some people, even here on HN, have!

Your "my life in weeks" page is just lovely. I teared up from the tenderness of it.

That is such a great idea. I have been toying with the idea of writing a memoir, but I haven't started because it seems so daunting of a task. This, on the other hand, is constrained, but still leaves a lot of room for creativity.

Thanks! You might like this then https://untested.sonnet.io/Stream+of+Consciousness+Morning+N...

I've been doing this since the late 2019 and it's become a huge part of my life, my relationship with myself and others.

I believe this can be implemented via XMPP's presence protocol [0].

IIRC this is what WhatsApp did, and sharing your current status was the original purpose of WhatsApp. Messaging and calls were added later.

0: https://xmpp.org/rfcs/rfc6121.html#presence

This is not a new idea, there is some prior work:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol) (one of the earliest implementations of the idea)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microblogging (the general concept)

- https://spec.indieweb.org/ (existing standards for this kind of thing)

Before Mastodon there was Identica/Status.Net, before that generation of tools there were bots that would let you update a page on your website by sending a short message from your chat client. Even Twitter had SMS and XMPP interfaces for this, in the early days.

Ah! The .plan file that finger(1) used reinvented for the Web world.

Perhaps we can just:

ln -s .plan ~/public_html/now/index.html

Sure, we can run it through some template or use awk, but what the heck.

Awesome concept that needs to come back, it reminds me of John Carmack’s .plan file.

https://fabiensanglard.net/fd_proxy/doom3/pdfs/johnc-plan_19...

Is this a blog for people who want to blog, but don't want to call it a blog?

I think so, I feel I'm missing the point of this one

Looks more like a status page. Where blogs are historical lists of articles, this page gets updated regularly, with new content overwriting the old.

> Where blogs are historical lists of articles, this page gets updated regularly, with new content overwriting the old.

Looks like the same to me. The page gets updated "regularly" (like a blog) and older content serves as a history of what the person was doing at that moment.

A blog is (by default) additive. You append by adding a new post, the items are ordered by date of creation, and you rarely remove old content.

If you look at the author's /now page, it's very clearly not that: https://sive.rs/now.

Some people are recording previous /now posts, which I will probably do as well, as it could be interesting to see how my life changes over the year (I really enjoy reading previous "Year Compasses.")

However it's very obviously not a blog since a blog encompasses a much larger concept. You can blog about your hobbies, interests, specific topics, related or otherwise. I'm confused at the OP's confusion between a blog and a /now page.

>However it's very obviously not a blog since a blog encompasses a much larger concept. You can blog about your hobbies, interests, specific topics, related or otherwise.

Hm? And you can also blog the same content as you put on /now. Many people do. A public journal of whatever is going on in author's life is pretty much the OG idea of a weblog.

Ok so it’s a blog homepage: like a blog, but truncated to the last X months/years.

From experience... /now pages are usually /then pages. Whatever you do, add an update date so we know if you lost interest in updating or if the information is recent.

Perhaps a new entry in the web's most horrible standard: /.well-known/now ?

For anyone curious: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5785

This sounds a lot like what an RSS feed is supposed to achieve. "What I'm doing now" is a lot of the original point of a blog (web log). The way one keeps up to date is having a "current" link to the most recent item, forward/backward navigation, and an RSS/Atom feed to automate the process.

> "What I'm doing now" is a lot of the original point of a blog (web log).

Or, Twitter! Giving short status reports was the original point of that application, maybe the only one it ever had.

Yes, twitter et al. are types of "microblogging," which is itself a type of blogging.

For reference: https://nownownow.com/

What do you mean by "for reference"? That URL is feature prominently in the linked blog post.

More in the same spirit: https://aboutideasnow.com/

Is this site still working? I get no response when doing a search and can’t add my site either.

Yes, same. The search on https://aboutideasnow.com/ does NOT work.

It is a very nice and important initiative. Blogs and personal pages are the essence of the Internet and anything that aims to honor them should be encouraged. Many people worry about the imminent collapse of original and clean sources, essential for the functioning of LLMs, but blogs can be the salvation. They are the main source of diverse and original material, given their sheer number and update frequency. For this reason alone, they should receive more attention and care from search engines [especially Google, which aims to be a player in the AI sector]. Your idea also has an interesting social flare.

Congrats and thank you for your work. I hope to add my blog as soon as I have my /now.

I just look at folks' GitHub Activity Graph.

There's not a whole ton of folks that I'm particularly interested in knowing what they are doing, away from the technical interactions that we're having. It's not because I'm a misanthrope, but because I already have a circle of friends and acquaintances that I get that information, verbally, from, each day.

But I'm not saying it's a bad idea; just that I'm probably not one to use it.

I've gone with a "lately" blurb instead of "now" page (https://wonger.dev/#lately) Feels more honest. More like "what is the newest thing I want to tell a stranger" rather than "catch up with a friend you haven't seen in a year." Sorta like Twitter, I suppose.

I've been a part of /now movement for a few years. Yes, remembering to update the page is a problem. I've set up a calendar event once a month to finally get ahold of the stale content.

Drop your now link below and let's get in touch: https://nazavo.com/now/

I think 99% of your viewers will care a lot more about /how and /why. But its your website, do whatever you want.

I have one and rely on a recurring event on my calendar to update it every couple of months

https://www.dsebastien.net/now/

Sounds like the .plan file in a Unix home directory, updated for today's web sensibilities.It would be nice to hook up my .plan to my website. There's a nice weekend project.

Does it have to /now exactly? Can it be /now.html?

I don't have any fancy tools or frameworks to create extension-less URLs. I just dump my HTMLs into a folder. So can /now.html work for this?

Edit: Wow! Why downvote me for an honest question? What's so revolting about this question that you feel the need to downvote this?

Usually having index.html in /now would behave as if the /now was the page. Other index.extension files (like index.php) might also work depending on the server configuration.

You mean like /now/index.html. Yeah, that could work! Thanks!

But "/now.html" feels "cleaner" to me. I know others might disagree.

If this now thing could support just "/now.html" or even "/now" redirecting to "/now.html", that would be swell! Maybe they already do support it? Hoping to learn from the community if these alternative paths are supported.

What do you want out of support? Listings on the nownownow.com site seem to be done manually, so it shouldn't matter what you make the path if that's what you're going for.

/now is cleaner in practice, because it's shorter, matches a (nascent, proposed) "standard", and hides the implementation details.

File path /now/index.html is a fine way to expose your content at /now ... Most webservers will default to config that allows this.

You could replace it in the future with a gigantic web app that is wired into your brain implant to retrieve realtime status. If you use /now.html, you would have to fight the framework to lie about the implementation details, instead of just not specifying them in the first place.

You could also configure your webserver to serve /home/carbonatom/webstuff/dereks-idea/now/new-version-2025.html as /now, if you like. These are the kind of implementation details that a good URL will hide (even if the specific example is a terrible case, the equivalent does happen sometimes!).

You don't have to do any tricks with index.html or "fancy tools or frameworks to create extension-less URLs"

there's no reason your HTML files have to be named with .html at the end of the filename

> there's no reason your HTML files have to be named with .html at the end of the filename

How do you know that? Do you know how I use my computer? I need to browse the HTML files lying on my disk with my browser? My OS and browser does not open files that are not named .html on the disk as HTML pages on the browser. So I need them to be .html so that I can browse my pages on my laptop.

Very cool idea, but maybe it should be called /was :D I wonder how many of these /now pages will be updated?

its all about friction. I hade numerous blogs where the manual operations ruined the relevancy. If updating your "now" page would be as simple as tweeting or posting on facebook, people would do it. Heck, ill make a stupid simple ssg with web administration for this stuff

Working at company B

Working at company A

Looks like we also need an aggregation standard for this. Maybe bsky or something?

Given the tech we have now, it should probably be auto updating.. ;)

can anybody educate me on this ? i have no idea whats going on

The author encourages people to create a /now path for their personal domain (e.g. https://devdaim.me/now) and write about what they're currently doing or working on. The author also built nownownow.com where he aggregates people's /now pages. See https://nownownow.com/about for more info.

Great summary. Thank you.

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