Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

A new “frontpage for personal blogs” that aggregates RSS feeds in a clean, HN-style interface is rekindling interest in hand-curated discovery on the web. Commenters praise its minimalist, chronological approach as an antidote to ad-driven, algorithmic feeds, and connect it to older ideas like webrings, blogrolls, and “planets” while proposing enhancements such as language filters, search, dark mode, and public curated lists. At the same time, they debate how (or whether) to rank for “quality,” how to keep spam and AI-generated content at bay, and whether such human-maintained indexes can scale or survive long term.

Overall reception & use

  • Many commenters are enthusiastic, calling it refreshing, nostalgic, and “small web”-aligned.
  • Several immediately submitted their blogs; some said it motivated them to add or fix RSS feeds or revive dormant blogs.
  • Some see it as a new homepage or a go-to discovery tool for authentic, personal writing.

Design, features & requests

  • The minimal HN-style version is widely praised; some prefer it over the “modern” version.
  • Feature requests: search on the minimal site, RSS feed of the frontpage, filtering by language and content type, dark mode, a “music” category, optional likes, and possibly a fixed header.
  • A few bugs are reported: pagination limits in the minimal blog list, infinite scroll hiding the footer, and JS-dependent category filters (breaking no-JS/Dillo use).

Chronological vs algorithmic feeds & “quality”

  • The frontpage is strictly chronological with no voting or ranking; the creator explicitly wants to avoid algorithmic feeds to stay true to RSS.
  • Some want personalization (filters, keyword exclusion, or popularity sort) and ways to hide “low-quality” posts.
  • Others strongly defend intentional uncuration and the inclusion of “low” or non-commercial writing, arguing that modern obsession with “quality” is tied to monetization and influencer culture.

Discovery models: webrings, blogrolls & small web

  • Large subthread on whether this is a return to webrings/blogrolls and hand-curated indexes.
  • Suggestions include:
    • Webrings and blogroll pages as decentralized discovery.
    • Building social graphs from “blogs I read” links (PageRank-like).
    • Topic “planets,” curated lists of lists, and tree-structured curation.
    • Alternative tools like Kagi Small Web, Minifeed, marginalia, Smolnet/Gemini, etc.
  • One explanation for the historical decline of webrings: search engines became good enough that people stopped browsing via link chains.

Comments, community & moderation

  • Mixed feelings about comments on blogs: nostalgia for conversations vs. spam/rudeness.
  • Alternatives mentioned: social-media-based discussions (e.g., POSSE), email contact, or lightweight hosted comment systems.
  • Some imagine adding comments/voting to this frontpage; others warn this invites spam, brigading, and the same dynamics as Reddit/HN.

Scalability, longevity & comparisons

  • All submissions are manually reviewed; some question long-term scalability, others like the human gatekeeping.
  • The creator notes low hosting costs and static-site architecture to keep it sustainable.
  • Comparisons are drawn to HN, subreddits, RSS readers, and other blog aggregators; some think this overlaps existing tools, others value its simplicity and explicit focus on the “small web” and non-AI, non-SEO-driven content.