7 ms·
How and why to make a /now page on your site
- sarimkx 2y agoFor reference: https://nownownow.com/ https://nownownow.com/
- yau8edq12i 2y agoWhat do you mean by "for reference"? That URL is feature prominently in the linked blog post.
- castalian 2y agoMore in the same spirit: https://aboutideasnow.com/ https://aboutideasnow.com/
- pixelmonkey 2y agoIs this site still working? I get no response when doing a search and can’t add my site either.
- sarimkx 2y agoYes, same. The search on https://aboutideasnow.com/ https://aboutideasnow.com/ does NOT work.
- amszmidt 2y agoAh! The .plan file that finger(1) used reinvented for the Web world.
- readingnews 2y agoPerhaps we can just: ln -s .plan ~/public_html/now/index.html Sure, we can run it through some template or use awk, but what the heck.
- jl6 2y agoPerhaps a new entry in the web's most horrible standard: /.well-known/now ?
- petecooper 2y agoFor anyone curious: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5785 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5785
- yreg 2y agoIs this a blog for people who want to blog, but don't want to call it a blog?
- john___matrix 2y agoI think so, I feel I'm missing the point of this one
- azangru 2y agoLooks more like a status page. Where blogs are historical lists of articles, this page gets updated regularly, with new content overwriting the old.
- hk__2 2y ago> Where blogs are historical lists of articles, this page gets updated regularly, with new content overwriting the old. Looks like the same to me. The page gets updated "regularly" (like a blog) and older content serves as a history of what the person was doing at that moment.
- hyperpape 2y agoA blog is (by default) additive. You append by adding a new post, the items are ordered by date of creation, and you rarely remove old content. If you look at the author's /now page, it's very clearly not that: https://sive.rs/now https://sive.rs/now.
- komali2 2y agoSome people are recording previous /now posts, which I will probably do as well, as it could be interesting to see how my life changes over the year (I really enjoy reading previous "Year Compasses.") However it's very obviously not a blog since a blog encompasses a much larger concept. You can blog about your hobbies, interests, specific topics, related or otherwise. I'm confused at the OP's confusion between a blog and a /now page.
- pablo1 2y agoI've been thinking about something like this for a while, wondering if it could be a decentralized alternative to social media timelines. I really like the idea of having a /now page with a short public status that you could share with friends and which can be less work to update than writing an entire blog post. That being said, the "standard" you defined could have been bit more specific in my opinion. If I have multiple friends with /now pages, I would like to read them all in one place. For this RSS would work nicely, maybe with a separate feed from your blog. If you don't want RSS, maybe making the /now page a uniform text-based format would have been better? Just an opinion on this.
- zimpenfish 2y agoSounds like you're after something like TWTXT[1] [1] https://indieweb.org/twtxt https://indieweb.org/twtxt
- rpastuszak 2y agoHehe, I'm actually playing with a similar idea. I'm still trying to figure out how to reduce friction for less tech-savvy users, so have both the ability to plug in your own feed or use the UI on the site. I wrote about now pages here https://untested.sonnet.io/My+Now+Page https://untested.sonnet.io/My+Now+Page I also made a version of "my life in weeks" https://days.sonnet.io https://days.sonnet.io as an excuse for reflection, an excuse to get the bird's eye view of my life, then to encourage others to do something similar. And, some people, even here on HN, have!
- OnACoffeeBreak 2y agoYour "my life in weeks" page is just lovely. I teared up from the tenderness of it. That is such a great idea. I have been toying with the idea of writing a memoir, but I haven't started because it seems so daunting of a task. This, on the other hand, is constrained, but still leaves a lot of room for creativity.
- rpastuszak 2y agoThanks! You might like this then https://untested.sonnet.io/Stream+of+Consciousness+Morning+Notes https://untested.sonnet.io/Stream+of+Consciousness+Morning+N... I've been doing this since the late 2019 and it's become a huge part of my life, my relationship with myself and others.
- hennell 2y agoThis is an interesting idea, but like most things it's just going to age. checking nownownow.com for people in the UK with one, the first 2 I picked were updated in 2021 the next 2023. Then I had two that were this month and last. TBH linking to a twitter or equivalent social media might be better. Or make now now now a more automatic system.
- zimpenfish 2y agoI think I looked at about 6 from the UK and 4 of them had huge headshots at the top which pushed all the information below the fold. Think maybe only two of them were actually had "now" kind of information as well.
- DeathArrow 2y ago>This is an interesting idea, but like most things it's just going to age. You can use an LLM to extract and summarize data from your social media.
- seanhunter 2y agoThis is like a second law of thermodynamics for communication. You take something that's already pretty low signal and then extract whatever from it and republish some slop you generate from that using a model. Models are then trained on published media and thus the circle continues, with everything trending to sludge over time.
- paxys 2y agoYup. The majority of people on the planet already have a "now" page, and that is their social media profile.
- _xivi 2y ago> The majority of people on the planet already have a "now" page, and that is their social media profile. You might be right but the people who have personal websites/blogs with enough passion to add a now page are likely to be in the opposite camp, the minority who dislike social media
- hlubac 2y agoits all about friction. I hade numerous blogs where the manual operations ruined the relevancy. If updating your "now" page would be as simple as tweeting or posting on facebook, people would do it. Heck, ill make a stupid simple ssg with web administration for this stuff
- devdaim 2y agocan anybody educate me on this ? i have no idea whats going on
- bertman 2y agoThe author encourages people to create a /now path for their personal domain (e.g. https://devdaim.me/now https://devdaim.me/now) and write about what they're currently doing or working on. The author also built nownownow.com where he aggregates people's /now pages. See https://nownownow.com/about https://nownownow.com/about for more info.
- sivers 2y agoGreat summary. Thank you.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI just look at folks' GitHub Activity Graph. There's not a whole ton of folks that I'm particularly interested in knowing what they are doing, away from the technical interactions that we're having. It's not because I'm a misanthrope, but because I already have a circle of friends and acquaintances that I get that information, verbally, from, each day. But I'm not saying it's a bad idea; just that I'm probably not one to use it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- apples_oranges 2y agoGiven the tech we have now, it should probably be auto updating.. ;)
- Shorel 2y agoAwesome concept that needs to come back, it reminds me of John Carmack’s .plan file. https://fabiensanglard.net/fd_proxy/doom3/pdfs/johnc-plan_1999.pdf https://fabiensanglard.net/fd_proxy/doom3/pdfs/johnc-plan_19...
- carbonatom 2y agoDoes it have to /now exactly? Can it be /now.html? I don't have any fancy tools or frameworks to create extension-less URLs. I just dump my HTMLs into a folder. So can /now.html work for this? Edit: Wow! Why downvote me for an honest question? What's so revolting about this question that you feel the need to downvote this?
- denzil 2y agoUsually having index.html in /now would behave as if the /now was the page. Other index.extension files (like index.php) might also work depending on the server configuration.
- carbonatom 2y agoYou mean like /now/index.html. Yeah, that could work! Thanks! But "/now.html" feels "cleaner" to me. I know others might disagree. If this now thing could support just "/now.html" or even "/now" redirecting to "/now.html", that would be swell! Maybe they already do support it? Hoping to learn from the community if these alternative paths are supported.
- Zambyte 2y agoWhat do you want out of support? Listings on the nownownow.com site seem to be done manually, so it shouldn't matter what you make the path if that's what you're going for.
- quesera 2y ago/now is cleaner in practice, because it's shorter, matches a (nascent, proposed) "standard", and hides the implementation details. File path /now/index.html is a fine way to expose your content at /now ... Most webservers will default to config that allows this. You could replace it in the future with a gigantic web app that is wired into your brain implant to retrieve realtime status. If you use /now.html, you would have to fight the framework to lie about the implementation details, instead of just not specifying them in the first place. You could also configure your webserver to serve /home/carbonatom/webstuff/dereks-idea/now/new-version-2025.html as /now, if you like. These are the kind of implementation details that a good URL will hide (even if the specific example is a terrible case, the equivalent does happen sometimes!).
- oefrha 2y agoJust use good old /about or equivalent. For most people who aren’t thinking about their website every day, /now will inevitably end up as “what I was doing when I last remembered I have a /now page” instead of what they’re actually doing now. Idea for the future: in a few years, check how many /now pages were last updated in May 2024.
- darreninthenet 2y agoI host mine on (the rather very good) omg.lol and they send me a weekly reminder via email... I can even update it by replying to the email using markdown https://darreninthe.net/now https://darreninthe.net/now
- mwidell 2y agoFor every Derek Sivers there are 9999 people who don't even care to update their website on a yearly basis.
- sneak 2y agoI use a jekyll/CI/static hosting workflow, and even though I make a zillion git commits a day, somehow branching, editing, PRing, and merging one to my website seems like friction. I have a 4-5 posts in my head I want to make that have been languishing for weeks/months because it feels like too much of a hassle. I'm thinking of moving to a wordpress-backed CMS (that gets ingested by the static page build system) just to remove it, so I can simply type into a box and smash a button.
- mplanchard 2y agoWhy not develop on and push directly to your main branch?
- idamantium 2y agothis is what i've done. never really broke the site in a way that i couldn't easily roll back and fix, and that was rare. what really slowed me down was messing up my local ruby installation because i really don't know anything about ruby. chatgpt helped me finally fix that though.
- pixelmonkey 2y agoThis is a cool idea. I also really like simonw’s TIL feed: https://til.simonwillison.net/ https://til.simonwillison.net/ Like a microblog of little learnings in day-to-day development. One interesting thing that occurred to me recently is that my personal site (https://amontalenti.com https://amontalenti.com) is more an essay archive and identity verification tool, than it is a “blog” or “microblog.” That is, the timestamps of the content on there are the least interesting thing about it. The most valuable page, for me, is https://amontalenti.com/archive https://amontalenti.com/archive. As for something like /now, the most fascinating implementation of this is an old friend of mine from college. He and I were both early 2000s bloggers, but he came up with the idea, in 2001 or so, to keep a nearly-daily one sentence personal diary on his blog. He kept that up for the last 20+ years (he is nowadays a CS researcher and inventor in HCI). Very impressive near-daily microblogging habit over a lifetime! https://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Home/Log https://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Home/Log
- jalict 2y agoGreat examples, thanks for sharing all of them! Love Chris’ real life commits messages. Find them very nice just to get general overview of what was going on in your life at the time.
- est 2y agoLooks like we also need an aggregation standard for this. Maybe bsky or something?
- sumanthvepa 2y agoSounds like the .plan file in a Unix home directory, updated for today's web sensibilities.It would be nice to hook up my .plan to my website. There's a nice weekend project.
- xnorswap 2y agoI miss the days when we had enough trust, and even more naivety, to have the finger protocol. For those who didn't know or don't remember what the finger protocol was: > The program would supply information such as whether a user is currently logged-on, e-mail address, full name etc. As well as standard user information, finger displays the contents of the .project and .plan files in the user's home directory. The idea of showing a real name, email address and logged in status, without the explicit consent of that person, is completely incompatible with a modern understanding of trust. But a small protocol to find out what someone is up to, available on demand, well that would be nice. The key difference between this and something like twitter, is that firstly it's a first class protocol, there isn't a twitter protocol and you can't implement a twitter server and twitter client independently, but more importantly, it's pull not push. You're not being pushed notifications when someone updates their .project or .plan. You're not being pushed a feed of "recommended users". You simply ask for someone's .plan and get served it. Can you recreate that functionality with nothing more than HTTP and an index page? Yes, of course, and this is one such attempt, but until we have a simple client, shipped on most machines, where I could simply type the equivalent of "finger jcarmac@id.net", and get back a short burst of a dozen or so lines, then it won't feel the same. Of course money ruins everything too, it wouldn't be enough to provide such a thing, because people would far too quickly start having space reserved to advertising. There's too many eyeballs leading to too much money chasing those eyeballs. A handful of academics have a chance to push back and shun someone who tries to advertise on their usenet newsgroup. There's zero chance of that happening to anyone on any new platform now. Any platform that gets popular enough to "take off" will all too quickly be taken over by people who optimise for eyeballs, monetise those eyeballs and reinvest money into chasing more eyeballs. And that's a core "problem" with this project and projects like it. It's a social problem, not a technological one. The technology was solved in the 1970s.
- bongodongobob 2y agoIf there were 6 billion people on the internet back then it would have been abused. Times weren't better, people weren't better, it's just a numbers game.
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- dako2117 2y agoVery cool idea, but maybe it should be called /was :D I wonder how many of these /now pages will be updated?
- mikae1 2y agoFrom experience... /now pages are usually /then pages. Whatever you do, add an update date so we know if you lost interest in updating or if the information is recent.
- 1970-01-01 2y agoI think 99% of your viewers will care a lot more about /how and /why. But its your website, do whatever you want.
- koromak 2y agoWorking at company B Working at company B Working at company B Working at company A Working at company A
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- trelane 2y agoThis sounds a lot like what an RSS feed is supposed to achieve. "What I'm doing now" is a lot of the original point of a blog (web log). The way one keeps up to date is having a "current" link to the most recent item, forward/backward navigation, and an RSS/Atom feed to automate the process.
- karaterobot 2y ago> "What I'm doing now" is a lot of the original point of a blog (web log). Or, Twitter! Giving short status reports was the original point of that application, maybe the only one it ever had.
- trelane 2y agoYes, twitter et al. are types of "microblogging," which is itself a type of blogging.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Vox_Leone 2y agoIt is a very nice and important initiative. Blogs and personal pages are the essence of the Internet and anything that aims to honor them should be encouraged. Many people worry about the imminent collapse of original and clean sources, essential for the functioning of LLMs, but blogs can be the salvation. They are the main source of diverse and original material, given their sheer number and update frequency. For this reason alone, they should receive more attention and care from search engines [especially Google, which aims to be a player in the AI sector]. Your idea also has an interesting social flare. Congrats and thank you for your work. I hope to add my blog as soon as I have my /now.
- dSebastien 2y agoI have one and rely on a recurring event on my calendar to update it every couple of months https://www.dsebastien.net/now/ https://www.dsebastien.net/now/
- wonger_ 2y agoI've gone with a "lately" blurb instead of "now" page (https://wonger.dev/#lately https://wonger.dev/#lately) Feels more honest. More like "what is the newest thing I want to tell a stranger" rather than "catch up with a friend you haven't seen in a year." Sorta like Twitter, I suppose.
- nazavo 2y agoI've been a part of /now movement for a few years. Yes, remembering to update the page is a problem. I've set up a calendar event once a month to finally get ahold of the stale content. Drop your now link below and let's get in touch: https://nazavo.com/now/ https://nazavo.com/now/