Great to see another IndieWeb project on the HN front page. The more the merrier. At this point, it almost feels like we need a meta-directory to keep track of them all. For others like me who are fond of these projects, here are a few other directories and indices worth checking out:
I recently built a Small Web Discovery feature for the WebLibre Android browser that unifies multiple sources (currently only Wander and Kagi Small Web). The feature is still very alpha, in the upcoming weeks I will look into adding more sources. Documentation here: https://docs.weblibre.eu/weblibre/small-web.html and there are some screenshots in this Wander issue: https://codeberg.org/susam/wander/issues/11
Personally, I use https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/ to feed my search engine / crawler. It contains 30k + rss/atom feeds of indie web sites. Thx for sharing this and the other directories.
these are awesome. linking to all of them from III. i personally use Gossip's Web a lot (https://gossipsweb.net) to find new cool sites and wanted something similar but searchable. i also felt like i had a really good alliteration i couldnt waste
I wrote a similar post [1] some 16 years ago. My solution back then was to install Debian for PowerPC on QEMU using qemu-system-ppc.
But Hans's post uses user-mode emulation with qemu-mips, which avoids having to set up a whole big-endian system in QEMU. It is a very interesting approach I was unaware of. I'm pretty sure qemu-mips was available back in 2010, but I'm not sure if the gcc-mips-linux-gnu cross-compiler was readily available back then. I suspect my PPC-based solution might have been the only convenient way to solve this problem at the time.
Thanks for sharing it here. It was nice to go down memory lane and also learn a new way to solve the same problem.
This is a very nice project! Thank you for creating it and sharing it here on HN. I like the minimal version more but the modern version is quite nice too. I would probably stick to the minimal version but since it seems to lack the search feature I end up using the modern version for that.
By the way, some minor issues I found:
1. In the minimal version, when browsing the list of blogs I cannot get past page 12. The last page the UI lets me navigate to is https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-12 which shows blogs up to names starting with 'M'. I can reach page 13 by manually editing the URL to https://text.blogosphere.app/blogs-13 which shows two blogs starting with 'N'. However, pages 14 and beyond just load the home page. Surely there are more blogs with names starting with 'O', 'P', etc.?
2. The modern version at https://blogosphere.app/ uses infinite scroll, which makes it impossible to reach the footer. Each time I scroll down, more content loads and pushes the footer further away. I was only able to view the footer by modifying the DOM in the browser's developer tools. It would be nice if there were a straightforward way to access the footer.
Thank you for the detailed feedback. I'm glad you like this project.
1. Yeah, there are definitely more blogs. Seems like an issue paginating and fetching it at build time. I will check this.
2. I generally don't prefer infinite scroll but since people are used to it on social media, I kept it on the modern version. It does make it impossible to see the footer. I will figure out a way around this. In the meantime, the "Submit" page should display the footer.
I'm also going to add search to the minimal version since I also prefer it over the modern version and search is useful.
A choice to disable infinite scroll would be nice. I don't use traditional social media and I am not conditioned to find it anything but annoying. Please bring back buttons for those who prefer them.
Nice site. I'm going to see what unknown (to me) gems I uncover.
Regarding the infinite scroll with the footer, I like the path Valve has taken with the Steam store homepage. The footer is part of the infinite scroll, as in, when you reach the footer, the infinite scroll continues.
Hello @superkuh, if you happen to revisit this, could you let me know which browser and version you were using? It would help me decide how far back I should support.
Hi susam thanks for the heads up on IRC. I'm using an ancient firefox fork from ~2015 called Palemoon 26.5. I use it because it's the best available on my computer with the good screen reader and text to speech setup. I am not a javascript developer but my JS console says
"SyntaxError: Missing ; before statement" on line 136:
let consoles = window.wander.consoles
I'd bet it's that 'let' that's emcascript6. I sort of have a polyfill extension for some things from es6 but not all.
Thank you. This makes a lot of sense. I need to think it through since 'let' is one of the things about modern JavaScript that I quite like, so I need to decide whether I really want to go back to using 'var' again.
To be honest, I resisted adopting ES6 features for quite a long time because I was concerned about exactly this kind of situation, where a modern feature might not work in an older browser that is still in use. However, in 2022, prompted by ESLint's no-var rule [1], I began using ES6 features in my code [2]. Now I find myself wondering whether my earlier, more conservative approach to JavaScript might have been the better approach.
In any case, thank you very much for following up on this thread. It has given me something to think about.
If you are on a computer, you might be able to see the previous links that were loaded in your web browser's Developer Tools > Console. The Wander console tool writes logs there to describe what it is doing internally.
Sorry to know it did not work in your browser and thank you for reporting the problem here. If someone is able to reproduce it and share details either here or at <https://codeberg.org/susam/wander/issues>, especially which JavaScript features are not working, I would be happy to update the code.
I am aware that I have used a number of relatively modern features. For example, I suspect `for ... of` might be one, and perhaps `Element.append()` (instead of `Node.appendChild()`) could also be an issue. Unfortunately, I do not have old browsers to test this reliably, so any help in identifying the exact constructs or functions causing problems would be very appreciated.
Yes, this is a duplicate post created by a new account who seems to have copied my post from <https://lobste.rs/s/hjipba>. I have emailed the moderators to ask if they can mark this as duplicate and merge the comments here into the other thread.
Thank you for the clarification and also for reaching out on IRC. I'm glad to know it was you who posted this here.
At one point there were three duplicate posts on the front page, all referring to the same project. I was concerned that if HN users flag them all as duplicates, then all three might lose the front page presence at the same time, so I reached out to the moderators to resolve the duplicates.
Unfortunately this one ended up being marked as a duplicate, even though it had gained more attention than my original announcement post at the time. So thank you for sharing it here. I really appreciate it, as it helped bring some initial visibility to this project and helped it grow.
https://blogroll.org/
https://blogs.hn/ (by @surprisetalk)
https://hnpwd.github.io/ (I am one of the maintainers)
https://indieblog.page/ (by @splitbrain)
https://kagi.com/smallweb/ (by @freediver)
https://marginalia-search.com/ (by @marginalia_nu)
https://minifeed.net/ (by @freetonik)
https://susam.net/wander/ (I developed this)
https://text.blogosphere.app/ (announced by @ramkarthikk on 'Show HN' yesterday)
https://wiby.me/
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