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.

> 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...?)

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.

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/

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/

Cool project.

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!

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

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

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.

Lovely!

Those who enjoy this might also like:

- https://kagi.com/smallweb

- https://blogroll.org/

- https://minifeed.net/welcome

- https://ooh.directory/

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!

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/

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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)

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

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.

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

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

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!

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!

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

Interesting. I submitted mine.

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.

Did you use Frontpage to create your frontpage?

It's a very modern and clean design.

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

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

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

scoring will bring spam and voting brigades if not managed properly

Yeah we need to make curated human signals stronger.

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!

Nice project

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

But kudos for different people working on similar good ideas

This is silly.

RSS readers exist. Feed a Fever was even better.

perfect.

Great job.

Submitted my blog.

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