Personal sites are awesome, so this site was built so we can all discover each others. All the links are by folks that want to share their site with the world.
If you want your site to appear on here, go ahead and submit it on GitHub, or drop me an email.
It’s built by Andy Bell who has been building his own website and is at least IndieWeb aware. I’ve added the example to the IndieWeb wiki page for directories. While interesting and useful, like some of the other directories I’ve seen floating around, there is a small hurdle that one needs to be able to fork a GitHub repo, edit it, and send a PR to be included, though I do like that he has an email option to bring the technical hurdle down. The other benefit is that it allows people to modify or delete their data as well. I do like the decentralized nature of of it, but I wonder about scale and search-ability.
I can’t help but wonder about building a similar directory site that aggregates its data by Webmention and uses the h-cards from websites to automatically update itself. Naturally having an OPML file(s) (think various versions that are sortable using tags/categories) or some other exportable and/or subscribe-able ability for feed readers would be highly useful.
In addition to resources like chat-names, Indie Map‘s list, as well as some planets, OPML resources like my own IndieWeb list, and the IndieWeb web ring, this could be another interesting directory creation method for IndieWeb-specific websites.
Personal sites are awesome
It is an inventive use of Github. I definitely like directories of personal sites. Personal site directories are best populated by webmaster URL submissions, because it’s hard for an editor to figure out the themes of a site in a timely manner, and one problem here is that there is a lot of friction to submitting a site, although the email workaround is thoughtful.
Hrrm. What happens if the directory admin finds a simply stunning site that has no webmention or h-card capability? Do we abdicate our human judgement and automatically disqualify a more than worthy site because it does not have a barcode we like? I always have a problem with using just code up front as a criteria for inclusion. Or perhaps my bar is set too low: 1. it has a web address, preferably it’s own domain, 2. the site renders and is readable to humans, 3. the site has good content. I do think a directory such as you describe is worth trying as a long term experiment.The strength of a directory over a search engine is the human editing. Search engines cannot measure quality, only popularity. Why give up, even partially, one of your few advantages?The second thing, I don’t think a directory in 2019 can rely on webmaster submissions alone to grow the directory. A whole new generation of webmasters have come of age without directories, webrings and the like. They don’t understand the need to submit (silos), they don’t know they should submit their URL, they don’t know how to submit URL’s, they don’t know how a directory works or how to search one. I think any new directory has to just offer URL submission, but in the end go out and find good sites.
On Simplicity | Max Böck – Frontend Web Developer
On Simplicity | Max Böck – Frontend Web Developer