Show HN: AboutIdeasNow – search /about, /ideas, /now pages of 7k+ personal sites

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

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

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 · 2 years ago

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 · 2 years ago

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.

logtempo · 2 years ago

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 · 2 years ago

It's also not visible on mobile

phgn · 2 years ago

True, I removed it there without Louis noticing :)

Why do you want to filter posts by type?

sivers · 2 years ago

Very cool. I've got all the /now pages from https://nownownow.com/ in my PostgreSQL database (I'm the creator/admin of it) so feel free to contact me if you'd like a more direct data connection. https://sive.rs/contact

I'm currently going through every site on nownownow.com by hand, removing the dead and spam ones, since after years of automated scripts it deserved a personal visit to verify. While doing that, I'm updating things like when each site was last-updated and last-visited.

Anyone reading this, if you've got a /now page on your site, please email me so I can add you to nownownow.com

Yep definitely everyone add your /now site to nownownow.com too!

I feel like the directories each have a different purpose: aboutideasnow.com to connect people with similar ideas, nownownow.com as a personal look into people's lives.

Derek I sent you an email :)

joeriddles · 2 years ago

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...

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...

plumeria · 2 years ago

It would be nice if it also supported the If-Modified-Since and If-Unmodified-Since precondition headers.

nicbou · 2 years ago

Does it also look at JSON+LD?

jseliger · 2 years ago

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!

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!

jameschensmith · 2 years ago

Awesome! I recently started an "Awesome Website Paths" [1] repository. I didn't know about /ideas, and I haven't tracked /about yet. I'll add them later tonight and point both to https://aboutideasnow.com for now. In the past I've had each endpoint mention a specific page that's dedicated to the endpoint. I can make an exception until I find one of those dedicated pages, but I'll make sure to still keep a reference to your site when I do make that change. Thanks for sharing!

[1] https://github.com/jameschensmith/awesome-website-paths

surprisetalk · 2 years ago

I've been trying to make /wish pages a thing:

[1] https://taylor.town/wish-manifesto

I'll open a PR :)

louisbarclay · 2 years ago

This is an awesome awesome list! Thank you for adding /about and /ideas! It also reminded me to have a proper look for awesome-personal-sites or similar, and there are a few:

https://github.com/logancyang/awesome-personal-websites

https://github.com/christopherkade/awesome-dev-websites

https://github.com/tk-notes/awesome-personal-websites

This is so cool, thank you!!

Likely didn't find any reference of /ideas because we made it up :)

afrnz · 2 years ago

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?

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.

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 · 2 years ago

The only thing missing really is a search engine with an LLM. How do you plan to handle our new overlord indexing?

INTPenis · 2 years ago

Also /uses[1].

1. https://uses.tech/

aranw · 2 years ago

Oh nice I really like that. Ace definitely will add one to my site!

Oh wow, that is so cool! We hadn't come across it, nice UX too. Thanks for posting

theharshpat · 2 years ago

Super interesting, thanks!

digging · 2 years ago

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!)

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

bhasi · 2 years ago

Great! I don't have an /about or /ideas page, but I do have a /now and a /uses page.

https://gurudas.dev

I currently only have a short blurb on my landing homepage instead of a full /about page because I struggle with anxiety when trying to describe myself and my journey so far (also impostor syndrome).

I like the /ideas page too, but I may not end up finishing ideas if I get my dopamine fix early by publishing them to the world.

That's fine, good that we index all three page types.

I'm wishing you all the best in San Jose! :)

Thanks a lot! I really love this superset of /now pages with your own great idea of an /ideas page.