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Show HN: AboutIdeasNow – search /about, /ideas, /now pages of 7k+ personal sites (aboutideasnow.com)

586 points by louisbarclay ↗ HN
Hi HN!

It’s hard to find interesting people to work with on your ideas.

Our solution: index the /about, /ideas, /now pages of 1000s of personal websites. There are thousands of cool personal sites out there, with amazing ideas on them, but there’s nowhere to easily search through. So we built a simple site that indexes 7k+ personal sites [0]. We were inspired by Derek Sivers’ Now page movement [1] and other IndieWeb directories [2], but we figured that it would be more useful if we:

* Let you search directly across personal sites without having to visit them

* Take the content from 3 specific pages, /about, /now and /ideas, to structure everything

* Define /ideas pages as a space to articulate things you want to work on

We hope this’ll be a cool place for people to find others to collaborate with - would love your feedback. If you’d like your site to appear at the top, add it via the form and add a last updated date of today (any format). It’s completely open source (MIT) and open to contributions [3]!

Peter & Louis

[0] gathered from: 1) https://nownownow.com and similar sites 2) checking all HN posts since 2020 with more than 100 upvotes

[1] https://nownownow.com

[2] https://personalsit.es

[3] https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow

120 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] thread
Beefin
this is amazing, so many people struggling with coming up with cool ideas haha
phgn
For me it's actually that I have too many ideas and none of them are great. What makes ideas great I think is having the right people to try things out with -- hence this tool.

So there are a lot of uses for this :)

thebestmoshe
I have the same issue. I have too many ideas with very limited amount of time to work on them. When I meet people, I want to share my ideas and get feedback about what they would find interesting, use, pay for, etc.

I'm building a platform to do this, so I can share my ideas.

My page is at https://ideas.moshegrunwald.com

sph
Ideas are not worth very much, and many try to focus on world-changing ideas, which is the wrong approach. I sit on two or three profitable ideas at any time, there's just not enough hours in a day to dedicate serious effort to any.
phgn
I agree!

What would you say is the most important then? The right people, or sticking with something for long enough?

sph
Effort trumps everything. The difference between a dumb idea and a multi-million dollar business is how much effort you put in.

So effectively the problem most people have (including me) is finding an idea you will keep believing in even after the hype and excitement has faded down, and the only thing standing in front of you is the mountain you still have to climb.

bantunes
Hugged to death right now, getting a 500
phgn
Fixed now, sorry! It was actually a bad deploy.
ramon156
Still down
phgn 

  Error querying the database: FATAL: Max client connections reached
It's weird since the SvelteKit load() server function should be cached.

I added a fallback just now, sorry again!

phgn
Uh oh, the search overloaded the basic typesense.org cloud instance :(

I'm upgrading it now!

raduan
looks amazing, will scroll and find someone interesting today.
afrnz
Love it - I knew /about and /now but /ideas is new to me. I am adding this to my site as well.

Do you filter results based on last update?

phgn
Yep at least the /ideas pages that turn up on the page load are sorted by recency. You can also see the most recent /now pages by clicking the filter icon next to the search bar and selecting /now.

And we re-scrape all indexed pages every few days.

For now the search is purely sorted by relevancy (keyword + embeddings), but it yes would be nice to prioritise recent posts somehow. Since those are much more actionable.

phgn
And to clarify, we made up the /ideas thing. But IMO it makes so much sense since /about and /now are about the past & present.

Because where else do you write about the future?

jamesdwilson
The only thing missing really is a search engine with an LLM. How do you plan to handle our new overlord indexing?
isuckatcoding
Seeing some obviously bad dates: “Dec 31, 1969”
phgn
Sorry for this! I believe it's fixed now.

In which timezone do you live by the way?

city41
A lot of cards say "Updated December 31, 1969", what date are you all using to populate that?
phgn
GPT-3.5: https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/blob/main/apps/a...

But in this case the date seems very close to the unix timestamp 0 which we use when there's no date found. Maybe it's a local timezone issue...

Edit: this should be fixed now!

city41
Oh interesting. I never would have thought AI would be used for this. Does it also find things like the meta "revised" tag or anything like that? Doing some Googling it seems like officially it should be "revision", but seems like it's very common to use "revised"
phgn
I tried using https://www.npmjs.com/package/metascraper before which I believe does check this meta tag.

But a few websites set their updated date to the current date which was annoying, maybe to rank better in Google? And some people (including me) only mention the update time in the page text content.

I've used GPT to parse human formatted dates in another project too, it's quite reliable if you validate the output timestamp. And relatively cheap too if you only pass in the first part of the page text.

city41
I can see how it's a tricky problem. I wish html had more structure here (and people followed the structure, a whole other problem...). FWIW, my page has a "last updated" date on its now page but comes up as 1969 in aboutideasnow.

Oh, now aboutideasnow shows no date at all.

phgn
The vast majority of indexed websites don't have a date unfortunately :(

What's your website so I can take a look at the parsing?

desireco42
Like others said, I love it. This is good way to connect people by connecting their independent sites.
phgn
That's the idea! And especially if more people start writing /ideas pages I think the search will become better and the results more actionable.

Also, if you find something to improve, people open a GitHub issue: https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/issues

bilsbie
Neat idea! But where are all these websites coming from? People have personal websites AND they share random ideas?

Btw I don’t have a website but here are some ideas I’d love to work on:

Anything applying LLM to robots

Device that rides on top of roomba and taps its bumper (to turn it) if it sees something bad.

An employment agent for letting people try out new careers.

Cheap simple pickleball out ball detection

kgeist
Are submissioms manually reviewed by a human? Otherwise it can be abused for spam. Is it reindexed from time to time? Say, the submission looks okay, and then they change the content to something spammy. Maybe a Report button could be added in that case.
KomoD
Last I checked bleepingcomputer, ifixit, vibilagare.se, psyche.co and libreboot.org aren't personal sites.

None of those actually have an /about page, yet your site says they do...

Another funny thing: just search 404 or not found and you'll get a lot of 404 pages

phgn
Yes :(

Do you have an idea of how to remove company websites in an automated way? I didn't want to manually review all 7k indexed websites.

This is the GPT prompt I used for filtering domains to add, but it gives false positives:

  You are an API. Return a JSON array of booleans indicating whether each provided domain is someone's personal website. Use common sense. Make sure to return false for company websites.
layer8
Maybe change the API so that GPT can express uncertainty (make it a ternary value or even a confidence percentage), and then check the “uncertain” cases manually.
phgn
Great idea, I will try this. Thank you!!
tetha
Yep, most of our systems end up exposing a parameter like that to the customer. Some people only like the system to take action if the system is very sure, hate incorrect action and prefer unprocessed stuff in a queue. Other customers hate unprocessed items and prefer to cleanup incorrect actions. Takes tinkering to find the best.
netghost
For the 404s (assuming the status code isn't a 4xx), use a URL that you strongly suspect won't exist, then you can do a comparison (levenshtein distance, bag of words, etc.) to see if it's very similar to one of about, ideas, etc. pages.
andai
I think openai embeddings API could be useful here. Perhaps one of the neurons responds to corporate speak.
netghost
Since I see you're using GPT already, it might be nice to include a summary of any about page for a domain with the non-about results. That way I can see a little something about the person to give me more context.
anon115
i feel like this could be its own social media idk.
bbsz
I had the same thought. Doesn't aggregation of this type fall pretty squarely with federated/activitypub/bluesky -kind-of-a-thing?

It became almost pointless to try to host such a small search/aggregator as a separate web (discovery through web search is almost impossible and it's hard to make people stay on a new website today because of activity sinkholes like twitter/reddit. add to it a hassle of managing modern application at scale etc).

I don't know. But I feel that projects like such will have a higher 1yr survival rate when developed directly as a "feed".And, AFAIU, that's what activitypub got created for.

phgn
That's very interesting... What would you like to see "updates" about?
digging
Super cool project. Reading this introduced me to /now and /ideas and /uses, all of which I will be adding to my site this week. (I guess I know what goes first on /now now!)
phgn
Good luck, and thank you!

I personally really enjoy writing and updating my /now and /ideas pages [0], it's quite clarifying to list the things you really care about :)

[0] https://lindylearn.io/now

burningion
This is great, would love to see something like this turn into a social network of people building sites / pursuing ideas publicly.

Added my site makeartwithpython.com too.

thebestmoshe
I’m building something like this. It’s not yet available publicly, but you can see my personal page at https://ideas.moshegrunwald.com

You can see more details about this specific idea [here](https://ideas.moshegrunwald.com/ideas/i_mos2)

phgn
This is so cool! I love the upvote function :)

Could you put it at /ideas on your website so it appears on aboutideasnow.com?

thebestmoshe
It's currently available as a subdomain of my personal site, since I have not yet finalized the domain for this project. However, each user's page will be at a path of the primary domain (e.g. example.com/moshe). `/ideas` is not supported at a sub-path (e.g. example.com/moshe/ideas).

I will be supporting custom domains, so I could support `/ideas` only for those sites.

Other options include redirecting/rewriting your personal `/ideas` path to this product. Or, offering subdomains (e.g. moshe.example.com/ideas)

phgn
Mhh, I would love aboutideasnow.com to be interoperable with your project. Seems like you have more things planned!

The redirect option seems good, or supporting subpaths. If there's something I can do to help please write me an email [0] or open a GitHub issue! [1]

We just want more people to write about their ideas, and find others with similar ideas. It doesn't matter to me where that happens :)

[0] See https://lindylearn.io

[1] https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/issues

mxuribe
There have been many people already leveraging their own website as the basis of a *different* approach to social network...May i invite you to the wonderful, and very deep rabbit hole that is the indie web: https://indieweb.org/#.F0.9F.8C.B1_Join_the_IndieWeb

Don't let the view of this website fool you...there's tons of content there to start you off on a fun journey! Enjoy!

sT370ma2
One small personal social media site that often discusses issues surrounding building and hosting personal websites and social media sites is https://bluedwarf.top.
spencerflem
I like the site, but I wish I could see all the /ideas posts chronologically without applying a filter
phgn
Mhh why do you want to go through all posts? My thought was that searching would be more useful than a huge list.
spencerflem
Certainly its not more useful, and ik the pitch for the site is a way to find collaborators which this wouldnt help at all.

I just like seeing personal sites in a people watching kinda way. Its neat, and there's usually something interesting there, but I don't really have an objective behind it. Like scrolling twitter but instead of short form comedy and engagement bait its just peoples random ideas.

panarchy
I first thought it would be showing all ideas, about, and now simultaneously, but then noticed all the cards only had /ideas, then I thought I had to do url.com/now only to find that redirected to github instead. Then finally I noticed the little filter button. Kind of feel like the categories shouldn't be behind the button, it's not like they really get in the way visually and with them being the only thing there it feels like just an unnecessary extra click for a common function.

/userstory

Edit for positivity: It's a cool site though and I'll definitely be checking it out again in the future.

phgn
We actually had an argument about this and I wanted to remove the filters entirely (since I didn't see a use case for filtering), Louis wanted to keep them. The compromise is the filter button :)

I agree that showing all recent posts types would be more expected given the title. But with the stated purpose of the site right now being to "find people to collaborate with", /ideas posts are the most useful IMO [0]. And I really want people to write more /ideas pages.

Why did you want to see a list of people's /now pages?

[0] An earlier version of this site was actually called ideasideasideas.io and had only /ideas posts. But the other content makes the search much better.

panarchy
I agree that showing...

    That sounds pretty reasonable!

    I do wonder though if rewording "Find people to talk to or collaborate with by searching across the /about, /ideas and /now pages of 7487 personal websites." might help a bit? Maybe something more along the lines of
"Find new /ideas to discuss and collaborate on or even search for what's /new with people and what they're /about" to focus on the ideas coming first and are not just one of the tags of equal importance to search on with the others.

Why did you want to see a list of people's /now pages?

    Just exploratory curiosity (I also tried /about and /ideas, but left that out for brevity). Being pretty unfamiliar with the idea of /ideas and /now pages I just wanted to see what they tended to be like and it seemed like a core part of the website given the name.
Given the focus on the ideas part I don't imagine this suggestion to be entirely relevant, but I had an idea about turning your logo header thing that links to your about page (which imo is kind of unintuitive) into the filter. Have it so that that only the current one (or ones?) are colored in and the others are desaturated. And potentially moving the "building open source, starting a community, etc" div/search suggestions to show with the hamburger filter button.
phgn
Good points about changing the intro text, thank you. But from all the HN comments I gather that /about and /now are actually core to the experience too and it shouldn't only be about /ideas...

I had the same idea of showing the filter in the header but figured nobody would try to click it :)

logtempo
filters(template?) buttons are the first things I used. You should keep them. It makes engagement. First thing I want to do on a,new thing is to test it and filters allow this quickly
esrh
It's also not visible on mobile
phgn
True, I removed it there without Louis noticing :)

Why do you want to filter posts by type?

RamblingCTO
Awesome, just added this! I'm looking for someone to grow my "micro PE" of two side projects together, because I sure can build stuff, but not make them grow -> https://andinfinity.eu/about/ (or /now) I have paying customers for 2markdown, but not nearly enough for the potential it has.
phgn
2markdown is actually very interesting. You could expand into handling request proxies + JS rendering for people as well then it would be the easiest way to index web pages. We should definitely chat. I built unclutter.it before and the content ingestion for a reading tech startup. Will send you an email.

And thank you for the shout out of aboutideasnow.com :)

Making connections like this is exactly the purpose of the website.

RamblingCTO
Would love to hear from you!

I actually pondered going down that road. There's heavy competition though. Getting LLMs in touch with the web, not so much. So I decided to stay in that niche, as almost all customers come from there as well. And I'm integrated into langchain, that drives a big part of the traffic ;)

1123581321
This is really cool. I'd love to see duplicates or near-duplicates (as determined by the LLM?) to help match the thinkers.
phgn
YES!

Submit your website on the site and enter an email address in case this ever gets implemented :)

simonw
The semantic search actually works really well - https://aboutideasnow.com/?q=data+journalism ?q=data+journalism gave me a bunch of interesting people thinking about data journalism and related ideas.
breadchris
yes, this. it feels pretty magical to immediately find people across the Internet who have most likely "gone deep" on something I also have. it is surprisingly hard to connect with people like this in 2024.
joeriddles
I added my site and received the following response:

> josephriddle.com/ideas without update time

I looked into the source code to determine how it's finding the update time. Come to find out, it's using ChatGPT! [0] It appears to only be looking at the article contents for the date, not at any page metadata.

[0] https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/blob/main/apps/a...

phgn
Yep but there is a fallback to metascraper [0] which does check the HTML tags. However the fallback didn't work in case GPT returns a 1970 date -- I just fixed this! [1]

I think you can now remove the date from your post content and it should still work. If you submit your website again it should do a re-scrape if you changed the content text. Thanks for catching this :)

[0] https://metascraper.js.org/#/

[1] https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/commit/8b0ea5b46...

nicbou
Does it also look at JSON+LD?
jseliger
I tried to add https://jakeseliger.com, and I got an error saying that there is no "about" page. But if you look at https://jakeseliger.com/about, there is in fact one!
phgn
Oh, looks like the missing page detection went rogue in this case. It found the word "error" in your page and decided to use / instead of /about :)

I just fixed this, sorry!

jseliger
Thank you! I think the idea is very cool.