The Ask HN thread from last week about blogs was really enlightening for me, showing me a lot of people's work and opinions that I wouldn't otherwise have seen. In the spirit of distilling some of the best blogs from that thread, I created a simple Rails app that scrapes a list of blogs and provides them in a place where people can vote and comment on them.
Someone made the comment that they wished there was a version of Hacker News but just for individual blogs. This is my first stab at creating a place where people can find high-quality technical blogs written primarily by people.
You can see this is in the "about" page of aggregate.blog, but I'll reproduce my criteria for adding a blog the aggregator here:
- Primarily about tech/programming, but other technical topics are welcome on occasion
- Can't be mostly tutorial posts or how-tos
- No company blogs
- Needs an RSS or Atom feed
- New blogs are welcome once they reach at least 5 total posts
- Most recent post is less than a year old
- No more than two posts on any given day maximum
- Prefer blogs that are self-hosted (that is, not on Medium/Wordpress/Substack/etc)
- Cannot be behind a paywall
- No content allowed that is illegal, pornographic, violent, NSFW, racist, homophobic, et cetera
Blog discoverability is still a problem in the age of social media consolidation -- this is certainly not the only approach but I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback!
