HN Explorer

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mdoliwa
Hi, IndieFeeds is a HN clone, where submissions come from personal websites only. For now I add feeds manually while reading HN. If I see submission coming from personal website I check if it uses RSS and in case it does, I add it to IndieFeeds.com. So now HN works as a filter of content for IndieFeeds :). Site is probably lacking some functionality, but for now I wanted to share it with you and see what you think about this idea.

Besides that I love concept of RSS, so wanted to play with it :)

[dead] chovybizzass
Just registered, no way to post. i'm out.
[dead] ethink
Sounds good. Congrats! Just wondering if it can accept submissions as HN does or it just checks the RSS feed for newly created articles in personal websites? And if my personal website is using RSS, how can I know it's picked by IndieFeeder?

Thanks

elviejo
If I inderstand correctly, you created an RSS feed agregator, were the criteria for selecting the feeds is that a) they appeared on HN and b) they are perosnal websitea, not corporate..

I think it's valuable... but where do you draw the line betweeb perosnal and corporate can get blurry..

mdoliwa
yep, that's correct, in most cases I visit about page and see if it's single person's site.
jacobobryant
You might be interested in https://hnblogs.substack.com/. You could use its RSS feed as an input source. I'm not sure exactly what the author's filtering process is--I think it's partly filtering out domains that are known to not be personal sites and then going over the remainder manually, or something--but I read it every day, and while I usually don't follow any of the links, every once in a while I find something golden that I never would've found otherwise.
phgn
Interesting idea! There are so many great posts that otherwise get lost in the noise.

What is your main motivation for building IndieFeeds?

To get more activity onto the site, have you thought about including HN upvote counts & comments?

mdoliwa
Good question, and I'm not sure what's the correct answer for this. Sometimes you just want to build something. I guess my main motivation was nostalgia for the times when I first discovered Internet (late 90s) and I remember it as a network of personal sites, usenet and irc :) Besides that I thought it's something people here on HN would like.
ivanmontillam
Nice! How I can I add my feed? My website is my username, without the last "m" and dot com!
barelysapient
Like it. But please, set a max width on the contents and center it on the page like HN.
manx
Which voting algorithm are you using? I recently wrote an article about that topic and working on part 2: https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking...

Happy to help if you want to talk about it.

mdoliwa
Not sure where I found it, but I have it coded like this:

scope :ranked, -> { select('posts.*, ((posts.upvotes_count + 1) / POWER(EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM (NOW() - posts.published_at)), 1.8)) AS rank').order('rank DESC') }

manx
That's almost the HN formula. Make sure your age is calculated as hours.
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derekzhouzhen
Very nice. I think you need to decide what is the main point of your site. is it an alternative way to read HN? Is is a curated edition of HN? or is it going to be something on its own eventually, and HN is only a method to jump start it?
mdoliwa
I'd like it to be something on its own, and it's exactly like you said HN is only a method to jump start.
derekzhouzhen
There have been several similar efforts on HN recently; search engine for blogs, recommendation platform, etc. What is the number one problem you are trying to solve? Maybe we can join force and make a better platform together.

For example, my pet peeve for HN is that they don't send emails, so I have to check back here. So, my project is exactly about that: Your comment should be send back to you and the one you rely to, in full text with basic markup, with proper email threading maintained.