I mentioned in a sibling thread that this requirement was originally
added out of caution, mainly to discourage spam submissions. It no
longer seems necessary, and I was not entirely happy with it either,
so I have removed it now. Thanks for the discussion here, which prompted me to drop the restrictive requirement.
> Was disappointed to get into the description and linked Git repository and learn that it's only for sites that have gotten some traction on hacker news before.
Yes, I was not entirely happy with the restrictive wording either. The original requirement was added mainly out of concern about spam submissions (blogspam, AI-generated content and similar). But the quality of submissions has been surprisingly good and I am genuinely delighted by the number of interesting websites I have came across in the last few hours.
So I have gone ahead and removed the overly restrictive criteria language.
> Was hoping it would be a way to stumble upon potentially underrepresented content from folks in the hacker news community who don't normally get attention.
Yes, that was exactly my intention as well. Thanks for raising this concern. It gave me the push to update the README and make the intent clearer.
For this HN post, any website is welcome. A lot of URLs have already been shared and it will take me days to go through each one and add them to the directory. I may not add every URL posted here, but this thread is still open for people to share as many links as they like.
Also, the guideline of 100+ total votes across five or fewer posts is not a strict rule. It exists mainly to discourage submissions that point to very thin sites with little or no content. I have already made exceptions when a website has interesting content even if it has never been posted on HN or received many upvotes.
Also, a website shared today might not meet the 100+ votes guideline now but could meet it at some point in the future. That is another reason why all personal websites are welcome in this thread. Again, this is only a guideline, not a hard rule. If a site clearly meets the criteria, I can add it quickly and save time. If it does not, I will spend a bit more time checking that it is not spam and that it genuinely has something interesting to offer.
And encouraging 'Any personal website is welcome, whether it is a blog, digital garden, personal wiki or something else entirely' but then saying you're discouraging submissions with little content etc. Who knows what people decided to put on their personal domains, ya know?
Anyways, obviously a ton of ppl just threw in their urls here without much concern so it's up to you what you want to include. Onwards!
Yes, it would. If someone follows the links to https://github.com/hnpwd/hnpwd.github.io and decides to create PRs, they are very welcome. But if that is too much friction, I'd rather have the links posted here than not shared at all. In that case, hopefully I or someone else will make the code changes to add the website to the directory.
Web browsers are indeed forgiving when it comes to incomplete HTML. Some time ago, I did a small experiment to see what minimal HTML is required to display a simple 'Hello' page while adhering to the specification, passing HTML Tidy validation and also satisfying the Nu HTML Checker. As far as I can tell, it is this:
The body tag is unnecessary, tidy might complain but that is not the spec. The meta tag is generally unnecessary (the content encoding should be set by the server in the headers since it applies to not just HTML). The html tag is unnecessary if you do not want to declare the language of the document (which is generally a warning).
So I guess smallest without errors should be
<!DOCTYPE html><title>a</title>
And smallest without errors or warnings should be
<!DOCTYPE html><html lang><title>a</title>
And then any content that is not links, scripts, meta tags, etc. will automatically be within a body after like
In the past, I've had a few visitors to my website look at a possibly silly post and ask me why it was even worth blogging about.
That is when I bring out the expanded form of 'blog' in all its glory. It is my weblog. Of course I am going to log whatever I want for myself, regardless of whether it is interesting to others. I do not need to subscribe to someone else's notion of what is interesting in order to decide what belongs on my own weblog.
This is a nice post. Thanks for sharing it here. The only thing I would like to add to this fine article is that it is perfectly fine for a personal website to simply be a loose collection of pages arranged in an arbitrary manner. Not every personal website needs to be a blog.
Very often I see aspiring website authors quickly make life complicated for themselves by deciding they need a blog, which then leads to numerous questions about tools and processes that can easily draw anyone into busywork. That time could otherwise have been spent on actually writing posts, articles, games, demos, etc. for their website that one can look back with joy months or years later.
Website busywork is probably fine for people who genuinely want to spend their time thinking about tools and processes. But if you just want to put your thoughts out there, it can be more fruitful to simply publish HTML, written directly or converted from your favourite text format such Markdown, AsciiDoc, etc.
This is a topic I care about quite a bit and my complete thoughts about this would be too long for an HN comment, so I will just share a link to a post I wrote about this recently, in case someone finds value in it: https://susam.net/writing-first-tooling-second.html
I would genuinely like to see more personal websites, because they make the Web more diverse and more interesting.
I ran across this[0] post about a month ago, which makes an argument against the chronological blog, and to rather embrace the digital garden. I quite liked the idea. For so long it's felt like a blog is the default, but I find browsing pages without a blog much more interesting. I think it also removes that pressure to post all the time, as adding content is simply adding content. It doesn't matter when it was last updated. Looking at my history (which I had to use to find this), I deleted all my started and abandoned blogs the same day I read this.
edit... Ironically, I just clicked "All Articles" on his home page and it's a chronological blog... At least there is some curation to it.
If the loose collection of simple pages is updated relatively infrequently, you could simply manually update the RSS file as well, so people can still track updates easily.
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