Having external links on my posts would give my reader(s?) topical information from voices other than my own. And those indieweb(/smallweb/blogosphere/old web/personal web) voices could grow their audience.
There were two problems:
1. I'm lazy and didn't want to scour the web for the obscure subjects I write about, particularly after a brutal blogging sesh (iykyk).
2. Finding blogs and personal pages is hard*. See also The Small Website Discoverability Crisis(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38276951) and The Dark Forest Theory (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19972343).
* It's gotten a lot better since Marginalia Search came on the scene (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42836405).
The solution was to build my own compendium of posts from RSS/atom/"save html"/etc, then query this database from my SSG publish() function. So after a brief coding montage, I had a modest link database and an SSG that would add page footers with external links like:
+---------+
| Preview | Title and link
| img | Description
+---------+
This brings me to the ShowHN part. I enlisted my buddy - who'd been pivotal to the ideation and design - to build a web interface that would allow anyone to perform the same query: the plaintext of your page goes in, related links come out. It's up to the blogger/publisher/creator to decide who and what they want to link from the results.
That's the overview, the FAQ has more info. If our site gets the HN hug or you'd simply prefer not to click through, please find my top-level comment with examples from a couple of today's /active posts. Don't hesitate to reply to that comment with your own link and I'll run it through the offline tool, then reply with the results.
Similar projects
This isn't the first indieweb discovery tool to come across HN. Our project borrows ideas from search, blogstumblers, and webrings but hopefully provides a capability that none of these offer. To list a few:
Kagi Small Web (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37420281), Marginalia Exploration Mode (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30047455), indieblog.page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43139953), and a few others offer a random walk through the indieweb with varying levels of curation. We're aiming to provide the same easy discovery experience but with less randomness; pages about X link to pages about X.
Blogrolls (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16239822) and webrings are great for introducing readers to someone new that they might like. Our project provides the same discovery experience for blog readers but isn't confined to a web clique. Additionally, it links page-to-page rather than site-to-site so readers might see fewer topical curveballs.
We already mentioned Marginalia Search. We consider that the primary entrypoint to the indieweb (https://www.haukeluebbers.de/blog/2023-07-entrypoints-to-the...). Our tool is focused on moving around the indieweb and densifying links within it.
Big thanks to Dan for all the help with this post!
cosmicgadget•9mo ago
Below are some recent HN posts and the list of recommended reading. Caveat: the matching algorithm makes some arbitrary decisions so no two queries will necessarily be identical.
cosmicgadget•9mo ago
1. Machine learning adversarial attacks are a ticking time bomb - TechTalks (https://bdtechtalks.com/2020/12/16/machine-learning-adversar...)
2. How ChatGPT actually works (https://www.assemblyai.com/blog/how-chatgpt-actually-works/)
3. PrivacyRaven Has Left the Nest | Trail of Bits Blog (https://blog.trailofbits.com/2020/10/08/privacyraven-has-lef...)
4. Prompt injection: What's the worst that can happen? (https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/14/worst-that-can-happen/)
5. The big cybersecurity themes at Black Hat 2024 - and why they matter (https://www.reversinglabs.com/blog/the-big-cybersecurity-the...)
cosmicgadget•9mo ago
1. Five Advantages of Log-Based Change Data Capture (https://debezium.io/blog/2018/07/19/advantages-of-log-based-...)
2. Why Data Architecture Should Guide Your Query Engine Decision (https://www.onehouse.ai/blog/why-data-architecture-should-gu...)
3. Reimagine Apache Kafka (https://streamnative.io/blog/ursa-reimagine-apache-kafka-for...)
4. Book Review: Designing Data-Intensive Applications | Henrik Warne's blog (https://henrikwarne.com/2019/07/27/book-review-designing-dat...)
5. Of Streams and Tables in Kafka and Stream Processing, Part 1 (https://www.michael-noll.com/blog/2018/04/05/of-stream-and-t...)
cosmicgadget•9mo ago
1. Snell-Pym » Processor architecture (https://www.snell-pym.org.uk/archives/2017/03/17/processor-a...)
2. Fun with vectors in the Raspberry Pi 1 - Part 9 (https://thinkingeek.com/2021/08/22/raspberry-vectors-part-9/)
I think we have enough pieces of machinery working already that we can start with the most exciting part of this journey: autovectorisation!
3. Efficiently compiling efficient query plans for modern hardware | the morning paper (https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/05/23/efficiently-compiling-ef...)
4. Understanding SIMD: Infinite Complexity of Trivial Problems ?? | Ash's Blog (https://ashvardanian.com/posts/understanding-simd-complexity...)
5. SIMD in the GPU world - RasterGrid (https://www.rastergrid.com/blog/gpu-tech/2022/02/simd-in-the...)