Hacker News Reader

Comment by notepad0x90 | Hacker News Reader

There are just not enough ways to discover personal blogs.

HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN for..", and people trying to build HN clones.

Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long time.

I'm hoping people rediscover/reinvent slashdot.

View on HN

Try hcker.news' small web filter[0], which uses Kagi's small web list[1] to show a hacker news timeline that consists only of personal blogs.

It works really well if you're looking for a cozier timeline.

0: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true

1: https://kagi.com/smallweb

This is really cool, thanks!

Glad you like it!

If you blog I think it's really important to develop a habit of linking to other people's blogs. That's how blog discovery used to work back in the 200xs and it can still work effectively today.

If you mean creating a blogroll to show other blogs you recommend, that is no longer so effective now that mobile phones are most of the world’s default interface to the internet. Themes for common blogging platforms like Wordpress generally hide the sidebar, blogrolls included, on mobile.

No not a blog roll - more a link blog or a habit of linking back to pieces you found relevant or interesting.

Agreed on this. Blogrolls are okay for people wandering the blogosphere but you only get so much from "check out this peer of mine". Topical links (here is another informative post about x) are much nicer for a reader who is already reading about x. And link blogs are great because they endorse specific content from someone.

Like this page: https://www.immibis.com/outlinks/

It's just a list of hyperlinks to other sites with brief descriptions. I think it's a good idea and everyone should create one on their small website.

Everyday we get a little closer to web rings and I'm here for it

Next someone invent RSS and feed readers and the circle of life can continue!

My search engine has some not-very-obvious tools for exploring the link graph, that will occasionally turn up interesting things.

Similarity navigation: https://marginalia-search.com/site/simonwillison.net

Backlinks: https://marginalia-search.com/site/simonwillison.net?view=li...

Out of curiosity, I see my website not being well indexed and I wondered whether it is because I include ``` User-agent: * Disallow: / ``` in my robots.txt. What should one add to allow Marginalia to crawl their website?

This should work

  User-agent: search.marginalia.nu
  Allow: /

Thank you! I just added it :)

Yeah there could be better ways but I've found a handful of sites that are useful like https://indieblog.page/. I actually wrote up a list of my favorite personal blog discoverability sites here: https://nelson.cloud/how-i-discover-new-blogs/

> A list of all sites indexed by Kagi Small Web is on GitHub: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallweb.tx...

As a Kagi customer I have to say that's a disappointingly short list and static approach :/

A a Kagi customer I have to say that finding the Small Web list "disappointingly short" is kinda hilarious

If you consider how huge the web is then 23887 websites is not covering a small but a tiny part. Also the approach of maintaining such a list manually seems fairly uninspired.

If you just go by the number of websites, most websites are promotional slop though. The top 23887 websites that are actually good probably covers a large part of the subset of the internet that's actually good.

Anyway, Kagi Small Web is not a list of websites but a list of RSS feeds.

I built Scour to help me sift through noisy sources like HN Newest. For each article in my Scour feed, I can click the Show Feeds button to find what other sources that post shows up in. I’ve found that to be quite a nice way of discovering people’s blogs that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.

You can also scour all 14,000+ sources for posts that match your interests.

https://scour.ing

Marginalia is great. Also take a look at https://outerweb.org/explore

There’s https://kagi.com/smallweb

The animated basketball makes me dislike this page instantly. Amazing how much attention a 30px height can rob from the main content.

Noone uses Kagi.... compared to the big engines.

You don’t have to use Kagi’s search engine in order to use Small Web.

While we are here, may I ask what are some blogs you guys read regularly? (Regularly as in: going back to read new articles as opposed to a one-off link shared on some other platform.)

Cloudhiker is pretty healthy as a StumbleUpon revival. I've found lots of great personal blogs and sites across a lot of categories through it. https://cloudhiker.net/

Someone has built a RSS feed aggregator specifically for personal websites: https://powrss.com/

https://wiby.me

I really wish someone came up with an reddit alternative - perhaps stick to STEM + lifestyle topics only to keep things free of national/international politics - and thus free of interference/censorship.

I just follow people on Mastodon and read stuff they link.

What are your servers and or people to follow? My mastodon timeline is a wasteland

Bluesky isn't the Twitter of old but it's at least something. I gave Mastodon a spin for a while but it's pretty desolate in my experience.

I’m on a small boutique instance. I guess the trick is to follow somebody who reposts stuff from people around.

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