HN Explorer

Show HN: Hacker News user blogroll (dm.hn)

937 points by deathbypenguin ↗ HN
I saw this [0] pretty cool thread by user revskill, and wanted a quicker way to search through it, but also to keep them all in one place so I can read them at my leisure whenever I get time.

Right now is like 60 lines of Ruby using Nokogiri, but I will certainly look into it further down the line and improve the list.

There's a cronjob checking the thread every 12 hours but I will eventually shut that down and it will become static after that.

There are some really awesome blogs in there. I really recommend going through the list, it made my day.

[0] "Could you share your personal blog here". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081

192 comments

[ 8.8 ms ] story [ 3505 ms ] thread
skilled
Good job. I would honestly love this but with RSS feeds also, but I know it's a tough ask unfortunately. (Not for you, but in general)
xoranth
Most blogs that have RSS also have a `<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml">` tag that redirects you to the RSS feed. If you pass the link to the homepage to a feed reader[^0], it will follow the link tag and find the RSS feed.

[^0]: At least, Liferea on Linux, NetNewsWire and Vienna on Mac, do this. AFAIR NetNewsWire is even smarter than that, and can sometimes find the RSS feed even when there is no link tag.

marginalia_nu
A bit of a snag is that many CMSes generate multiple feeds, and there is no way I'm aware of for identifying which is the "canonical" feed.
deathbypenguin
I'll put the feed with the latest posts up over the weekend.
leejoramo
This is great. An OPML version of this would be great to bulk IMPORT the RSS/ATOM feeds into your favorite feed reading app.
rambambram
Indeed! But I guess not every blog has a feed, or there's no quick way of letting people add one to the list after the fact.
prepend
I expect that every blog has an rss or atom feed. It would be strange for someone to go to the effort of writing a blog and not setting up a feed. That and most blogs have feeds automatically.

That being said, any blog that doesn’t have a feed and has some proprietary subscription is not one I want to subscribe to. So not including feedless blogs is a positive for me.

akiselev
Our future AI overlords sincerely thank you for this pristine data set.
syx
I would add a shuffle button that opens a random blog so it’s nicer to discover something new compared to endless paginations.
deathbypenguin
Noted. I will be correcting a few bits and adding new functionality over the next few days/weekend.
danieldk
I missed the original topic. I’m not a very active blogger, but I am an active HNer. Any chance you could add my blog?

https://danieldk.eu/blog/

Nice work!

scastiel
+1

I would even add a “I’m feeling lucky” button, to redirect to a random blog ;)

deathbypenguin
Random blog button up now.
alonsonic
Love this, have been reading random blogs for the last 30minuts already
Moncefmd
This is great! Would've been cool to also be able to sort by votes though.
petercammeraat
Brilliant. Easy to use as filter for subjects (if people described their blog)
susam
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing your project here. Out of curiosity, I did some searches with some interesting strings. At the time of posting this comment, here is what the search results look like:

Vim: 8 entries

Emacs: 7 entries

Python: 24 entries

Rust: 24 entries

Lisp: 5 entries

Clojure: 3 entries

Haskell: 5 entries

Zig: 5 entries

Elixir: 4 entries

Scheme: 0 entries

Postgres: 4 entries

MySQL: 0 entries

SQLite: 3 entries

Jekyll: 9 entries

HTML: 40 entries

Markdown: 6 entries

LaTeX: 1 entry

Hugo: 12 entries

Next.js / Nextjs: 4 entries

Gatsby: 2 entries

Pelican: 0 entries

.com: 495 entries

.dev: 90 entries

.net: 84 entries

.io: 82 entries

.me: 53 entries

.org: 43 entries

.xyz: 15 entries

.page: 6 entries

github.io: 46 entries

medium.com: 18 entries

blogspot.com: 8 entries

wordpress.com: 4 entries

livejournal.com: 0 entries

tech: 178 entries

programming: 66 entries

random: 61 entries

thought: 49 entries

math: 16 entries

musing: 12 entries

blag: 1 entry

favorite: 28 entries

favourite: 9 entries

Now all of these results are string search results, so there is always going to be a little bit of noise when we try to draw conclusions out of these results. For example, the results for ".dev" also contains results that look like "*dev*.com".

Despite the noise, I found these results interesting. I remember in the early days when the blogosphere was being constructed 20 km above the tag clouds, it was very fashionable to have blogs for random musings or random thoughts. So I am delighted to see that most blogs out here are tech blogs. Surprisingly there is only blag. I expected at least a few more.

One of the Lisp entries is mine. Also, one of the Vim entries is mine. It is a bit ironical because I am actually an Emacs user. If I had known the comments we write on HN would become part of the search string in this blogroll, I might have chosen my words in my comment to the "Ask HN" port more judiciously! :)

boricj
reverse engineering: 5 entries

Ghidra: 1 entry (mine)

On one hand it does bring some level of perspective on the popularity of a particular topic you're into. My first reaction was "Just 0.5% for reverse-engineering? I guess I'm down in a deep dark rabbit hole..."

On the other hand, I haven't seen the blogs of Ken Shirriff, Alex Ionescu or Raymond Chen on that list, which I know are quite popular and regularly make it to the Hacker News front page.

saagarjha
Presumably this would require them to show up on Hacker News and advertise their blog.
TimCTRL
Saw the .hn domain and I was like What...HN has its own TLD. Then i searched google and saw it belongs to honduras...daft me i guess..
mcmcmc
All two-letter TLDs are country codes.
airstrike
hah, had to Cmd+F for this comment because I also :O'd
levysoft
I can't believe you had the same idea and necessity but you preceded me. Good job!
smokel
Great work, thank you for sharing this.

I would prefer to see the entire list, so that I can easily search for keywords in the browser. Apparently, all data is available on the client side, but the table renderer seems to limit the table size to at most 100 entries.

ryan-duve
A workaround while you're waiting for this to be supported by OP is to go to inspector and change the last dropdown option to

    <option value="10000">10000</option>
then select it in the UI.
re
This made me think of "planets", which I feel had a heyday back in the late 2000s before Reddit and social media took over everything. Anyone want to take all the blogs with RSS/Atom feeds and build an HN planet? :)

> In online media a planet is a feed aggregator application designed to collect posts from the weblogs of members of an internet community and display them on a single page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)

ploum
Yeah, planet were awesome. I’m proud to say that my blog was both on planet.gnome (the original one) and planet.ubuntu.

Now, I feed that the most interesting planet is planet.debian, which offers lot of variety without being focused on Debian.

The great feature I liked was that Planet were not about a given project. It was about the people contributing to the project. Their life. Their interests.

At some point, lot of planets started to ask only "on-topic" posts with a specific RSS feeds. Those planets became boring as it was mainly stuffs you could find on forum or any tech related websites.

kiruio
Cool, I forgot to add descriptions. Would be nice if I could fix it
amadeuspagel
The latest posts from these blogs: https://webloglist.com/hn
jakebasile
That's cool! Did you pull RSS from all the sites you could and use that to aggregate it?
amadeuspagel
Yes, webloglist uses RSS autodiscovery.
darekkay
It seems the autodiscovery didn't work for my blog (link in profile). I've posted something 2 days ago but it doesn't appear on your site. My feed is on the list from JSTucker, who also used some sort of autodiscovery.
amadeuspagel
Atom isn't supported yet. Working on it.

EDIT: Atom is supported now, but I haven't updated the list yet.

rambambram
Nice list! I was almost going to ask you if you have an OPML file with all the feeds, but then I decided to check the list manually for interesting latest posts and grab only their feeds. Thanks for the list!
addandsubtract
Now we just need ChatGPT to read them all and give us a daily update on the interesting ones.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
freediver
Any chance for an RSS of this?
tlavoie
Sort of a meta-feed, for those with feeds of their own?
1270018080
Conspiracy: That post was only made to harvest data for someone's model
bachmeier
Well, given that blogs are public and the whole point is for others to read them, I think that's okay.
jakebasile
Look ma, I'm in an HN link! This is pretty neat.
ghomem
Clap clap clap. This is excellent public service @deathbypenguim. Yesterday I was scrolling through that enormous thread and using control+F to look for keywords of interest on the posted blog descriptions. Now it will be much easier to follow fellow bloggers. Thanks for having my blog on your list too.
I-M-S
Can we do this for HN users' podcasts?
swyx
shameless plug for my pod: https://www.latent.space/podcast
cloverich
This is a great podcast; discovered it a few weeks back and have listened to a few now. I especially like that it doesn't devolve into just chatting, but actually covers technical topics and gets into some of the nitty gritty.
swyx
thanks very much!
1attice
Naked self-promotion here, but I was late to the party on the original blogroll -- is there any way to add blogs post-ex-facto? Is there a submission mechanism?
eigenhombre
Same, I think this is a great idea and would like to submit mine as well -- maybe an "add" feature on the page would make sense, or re-inquire here at intervals, maybe monthly/yearly?
TOGoS
I commented, but mine got missed, somehow. Maybe because my phone auto-capitalized the "H" in "http" and the script didn't account for funny capitalization. Sad!
scarface_74
You could make it so you have to have your blog in your HN profile and have a karma of at least $x to reduce spam.
slushh
>There's a cronjob checking the thread every 12 hours but I will eventually shut that down and it will become static after that.

Which post-ex-facto? You should still be able to add your blog to the original submission.

do-me
That's awesome and so much more practical than scrolling through HN. It would also be possible to integrate semantic search so people don't necessarily need to know the keywords. If you're interested, feel free to ping me or take a look at https://github.com/do-me/SemanticFinder. In case I could just create a pre-indexed version based on your data dump which would be quite convenient to use.
Aissen
It's very nice, thanks ! It would be nice if descriptions had new lines; some aren't readable, while they work quite well on HN.