HN Personal Websites Directory (HNPWD) is a community-maintained directory of personal websites by members of the Hacker News (HN) community, along with an OPML file containing their RSS feeds. Please visit the following link to view these resources:

• Directory Website: hnpwd.github.io
• RSS Feeds OPML: hnpwd.opml

• Add Your Website
  • Criteria
  • Add via PR
  • Add via Issue
• FAQ
• Licence
• Contact

Please check whether a website meets all of the following criteria before requesting its inclusion in the directory:

1. Personal Website

   The website must be a personal website. It should not be a company website or a community website. The website should belong to an individual.

2. English Language Website

   HN is an English-language forum, so this directory includes only websites with English-language content. Websites may also contain content in other languages, provided they have a significant amount of English content and visitors can easily find and navigate to it. Websites that are entirely or primarily non-English are not suitable for inclusion in this directory.

3. Author-Controlled Website

   The website must be a personal website where the author has full control over its design, content and presentation. This includes control over layout, styling and monetisation. Websites hosted on platforms that inject advertisements, branding or other third party content do not meet this criterion. Similarly, websites on platforms that limit the author's control over design or presentation in any way do not qualify.

   Websites hosted on personal domains clearly qualify. Websites hosted on services such as Neocities, GitHub Pages or Codeberg Pages also qualify, as these platforms allow full control over the site's design. However, blogs hosted on publishing platforms such as Medium, Substack, Blogspot, the free WordPress.com service, etc. do not qualify.

   Note: This requirement is about control, not quality. Many excellent blogs fall outside the scope of this directory.

4. Substantive Personal Content

   The website must contain substantive content such as articles, blog posts, projects or games developed by the author. This content must be hosted on the website itself. Websites that merely link to content hosted elsewhere are not accepted. Websites consisting only of a CV or portfolio are also not suitable for inclusion. This requirement helps keep the directory interesting and prevents it from becoming a collection of minimal or placeholder websites with little value to the community.

   Websites with only a small number of pages or articles are usually not included immediately. Instead, we wait until more content is added before considering them for inclusion in the directory. As a general guideline, we expect 5 or more substantive articles or other original works (excluding usual meta pages such as about, contact, etc.). Exceptions may be made in some cases, for example when a site has only a few posts but one or more of them have been very well received on HN. This requirement helps ensure that visitors arriving from the directory will find enough interesting content to explore.

5. Human Authorship

   Most of the content on the website must be clearly authored by the individual claiming ownership of the website. Websites containing plagiarised material are immediately disqualified. Websites consisting primarily of automatically generated content, including syndicated technology feeds, AI-generated blogspam or similar material, are not eligible for inclusion in this directory. Content that has been reviewed or edited by AI tools is acceptable but content that is purely AI-generated is not. This requirement exists to ensure a genuine human presence and authorship behind every website included in the directory. This is consistent with the spirit of HN, which does not permit automatically generated comments and is intended as a forum for humans.

Add the website details to pwd.lisp and submit a pull request.

A template entry is provided at the bottom of pwd.lisp and can be copied and modified as a starting point. When creating a pull request, please follow these guidelines:

1. Keep all website entries sorted alphabetically by name.

2. Write the bio text in the third person. That is, do not write:

   I write about functional programming.
   

   Instead, write about:

   Writes about functional programming.
   

   The intention is to reflect that the curators are adding your website to this project. Although you are the one authoring the pull request, it is intended to help the curators include your website more quickly. Therefore, the language should match what the curators would have written if they were adding the website themselves.

3. Ensure that the bio text does not exceed 80 characters.

4. End the bio text with a full stop (period).

5. Do not use ampersand ('&') in the bio text. Write the word 'and' instead.

6. Do not use Oxford comma (serial comma) in the bio text. That is, do not write:

   Writes about C, C++, and Go.
   

   Instead, write:

   Writes about C, C++ and Go.
   

7. Separate two sentences by double spaces. That is, do not write:

   Game developer. Writes about computer graphics.
   

   Instead, write:

   Game developer.  Writes about computer graphics.
   

8. Begin URLs with http:// or https://.

9. If a URL points to the root directory, include the trailing slash. For example, write https://example.com/ (not https://example.com). This avoids an extra redirect for many clients.

10. If certain information is not available or should not be included, remove the corresponding property entirely. For example, if no 'about' link exists, delete the entire :about line from the entry.

While we recommend that you follow these guidelines, do not worry too much about getting everything right on the first attempt. Automated checks run on every pull request and if you miss something, the failing checks will tell you what needs fixing.

Aside: The 6th (no Oxford comma) and 7th points above (double spacing convention) are likely going to feel awkward to many people. This project uses British English (BrE) and Oxford comma is generally not used in BrE. Further, the original author of this project uses Emacs and has configured it to follow the rather old convention of separating sentences with double spaces. As a result, we require sentences to be separated by double spaces here as well. Yes, you lose some precious bytes for your 80 character bio. Consider it the price you pay for including your website in this directory.

If creating a pull request is too much hassle for you, submit your website by creating an issue. You can do this by following this link: new-site.

While creating the issue, do follow all the guidelines mentioned in the previous section.

1. How is this different from the OPML available at outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs?

   The OPML file there is more comprehensive. It currently includes over 1200 RSS feeds, whereas our project only has a small number of entries so far. We hope that, with contributions from community members, our list will grow over time. An important goal of this project is to maintain the list of websites together as a community.

   This project also goes beyond providing an OPML file. In addition to the OPML, it offers a website that lists the websites individually along with a short bio of each author.

2. Why did you not start by importing outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs?

   We have not yet had the time to do so. The data format used by this project differs from theirs and requires additional information for each blog entry. Translating the existing list into our format therefore takes a non-trivial amount of effort, which we have not been able to commit to yet.

   Contributions that add entries to this project, whether sourced from that list or elsewhere, are very welcome.

3. I posted my website to your megathread on HN. Why is it not added to the directory yet?

   We received over 2000 website suggestions on that thread. Each submission requires a brief visual review to ensure it is a good fit for this directory, and this process cannot be fully automated. As a result, it is likely to take several months to work through all the suggestions we received.

   To track our progress, see our backlog tables.

4. Can I contribute my time and help you make progress faster?

   Yes, certainly. Currently, we are only two people working through the backlog. If you would like to help, please join us in our IRC channel #hnpwd. You may need to stay connected for a while after asking, as not all volunteers are present at all hours of the day.

5. On the directory website, how is the order of the personal websites decided?

   If JavaScript is disabled in your web browser, the websites are displayed in alphabetical order by the author's name.

   If JavaScript is enabled, the websites are displayed in a pseudorandom order. This order changes every hour.

This is free and open source software. You can use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicence and/or sell copies of it, under the terms of the MIT Licence. See LICENSE.md for details.

This software is provided "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, express or implied. See LICENSE.md for details.

To report bugs or ask questions, create issues.

Alternatively, you can also join our IRC channel #hnpwd on Libera Chat to ask questions or just generally hang out with the community.