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Show HN: AboutIdeasNow – search /about, /ideas, /now pages of 7k+ personal sites (aboutideasnow.com)
586 points by louisbarclay 9 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 119 comments
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




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 :)


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...


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


Good idea, I just created https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/issues/7 for this!


Does it also look at JSON+LD?


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!


Thank you! I think the idea is very cool.


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


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

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

I'll open a PR :)


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 :)


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?


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


Also /uses[1].

1. https://uses.tech/


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


Super interesting, thanks!


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.


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.


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.


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 :)


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


It's also not visible on mobile


True, I removed it there without Louis noticing :)

Why do you want to filter posts by type?


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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)


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

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


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)


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


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!


One small personal social media site that often discusses issues surrounding building and hosting personal websites and social media sites is https://bluedwarf.top.


I don't know if my website is eligible.

My homepage is a small introduction and a table of projects with links to those projects, which are also github repositories with a blog underneath.

This community standardisation I really like /about /now /ideas, I would like people to create github repositories with this format:

"wants" -> things that this person wants

"perspectives" -> technical perspectives on different subjects

"work" -> work that someone thinks need doing

"collaboration" -> what someone would be willing to work with others on

"commissions" -> what you'll pay someone for

"ideas" -> ideas

"blog" -> if your blog is hosted on github

"dotfiles" -> if you have them


Every page is eligible actually because we treat / as /about if /about is not present. Just try submitting your site :)

Another commenter here created a repo to track more standard webpages: https://github.com/jameschensmith/awesome-website-paths

For GitHub repos I'm not sure of any standardisation except README.md, LICENCE.md and CONTRIBUTING.md?


Thank you phgn

I submitted my personal homepage.

Those GitHub conventions are helpful. I was hoping people would create entire repositories in a standard convention too. Similar to Rails conventions.


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


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.


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.


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.


Great idea, I will try this. Thank you!!


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.


> For the 404s (assuming the status code isn't a 4xx)

Most are a 4xx code, I checked myself, some may be 301/302 redirect to 4xx not being handled properly by their crawler


Good point. We're using https://crawlee.dev, I think there's a way to handle more status codes as errors...

Right now it only excludes pages based on the text content: https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/blob/main/apps/a...


I think openai embeddings API could be useful here. Perhaps one of the neurons responds to corporate speak.


A little tangential but is there a good place to share one's personal website?


Cool site. Maybe implement /ideas and /now pages? I kinda figured they'd be there but they are 404.


Perhaps they could redirect to https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/issues and https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/pulls, respectively


Very nice idea, I just implemented this!

Feel free to create some GitHub issues at https://aboutideasnow.com/ideas to grow the list :)


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.


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.


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 ;)


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


YES!

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


Excellent work. This is a perfect demonstration of how valuable content curation can be, paired with an excellent presentation and user experience. You made it much easier to discover interesting people in the corners of the Internet, and I am grateful for that.


Ohh, thank you! :)


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.


No, there are just some static rules to exclude missing pages and /ideas pages which don't actually talk about ideas: https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/blob/main/apps/a...

And yes it's re-scraped every few days.

How could a process of reviewing the pages look like? Maybe it can be implemented with GPT.


This was my vision of discovery engine for the Web! I'm glad that someone turned it into reality but I think you should scale it to the whole Web not just personal websites. Amazing job, you guys did!


Thank you!! :)

What kind of websites do you want to discover other than personal websites? Why not use general purpose web search?


All kind of websites....ecommerce, corporate, government, non-profit etc. I think we need to evolve old-school type web directories and make what I call discovery engine because we already have search engines.

For example we should think how we can evolve old directory like this one: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Dmoz

Here is the new revived version of it: https://www.curlie.org/ but for sure something more sophisticated can and should exist.


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.


Thanks for sharing this great project! Randomly browsing through the first page results, I ended up reading some of the ideas.

Reading that someone else, somewhere else, has a similar idea, has made my day. Cheers.


Thank you!

Reach out to them and make the idea a reality :)


This is such a cool project! I do wish that there was a way to see all websites in a each of the categories. A mega list of /ideas, for example


I attempted to add my website and received the message "Indexed your website successfully! Found posts...". However, when I searched for something related to my /about page or my domain, it did not appear in the results. How can I verify that my site has been successfully added?


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


Yes seems like a good number of people randomly decided to add /ideas to their website. /now is more of a standard, see nownownow.com

There are some good results for your third idea, maybe you can talk to those people :)

https://aboutideasnow.com/?q=employment+agent+for+letting+pe...


This is a great idea. Just a quick feedback: when I search for "llm", I got quite random results.


Well the results are indeed "quite random"... A good test case to improve the spam filtering with :)

It seems to work much better with capital letters for some reason: https://aboutideasnow.com/?q=LLM


Like others said, I love it. This is good way to connect people by connecting their independent sites.


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


I can only seem to surface the first 15 ideas pages. No other search surfaces any other ideas pages. Surely there is more than 15 idea pages out of 7000. Great concept though.


This is amazing. I was just in the process of building a directory of personal websites.


i feel like this could be its own social media idk.


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.


That's very interesting... What would you like to see "updates" about?


I like the site, but I wish I could see all the /ideas posts chronologically without applying a filter


Mhh why do you want to go through all posts? My thought was that searching would be more useful than a huge list.


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.


I agree with this!


Amazing idea and such a cool interface!


A lot of cards say "Updated December 31, 1969", what date are you all using to populate that?


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!


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"


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.


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.


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?


https://mattgreer.dev/now

It says last updated today because I really did update it today :)

anyway, cool project!


Ahh, I believe we're not trusting the current date at the moment because of spam potential: https://github.com/lindylearn/aboutideasnow/blob/main/apps/a...

Which seems bad if you update your site and submit it afterwards. I'll remove this check for now.


Wow. Your site is awesome. I could use some similar stuff for books.


this is amazing, so many people struggling with coming up with cool ideas haha


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.


I agree!

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


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.


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 :)


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


I wonder if you could go through twitter posts and find idea posts.


Hm or Fediverse https://mastodon.social/tags/idea


looks amazing, will scroll and find someone interesting today.


Seeing some obviously bad dates: “Dec 31, 1969”


Sorry for this! I believe it's fixed now.

In which timezone do you live by the way?


Fuzzy search? “gaza” search returned results without that string or anything close.


I love this!


Hugged to death right now, getting a 500


Fixed now, sorry! It was actually a bad deploy.


Still down


  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!


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

I'm upgrading it now!




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