January 2024—Itching to find people to talk to about internet projects, I built aboutideasnow.com together with Louis Barclay.
Weird name I know. The rationale is this: nownownow.com from Derek Sivers show you a list of “/now” pages on people’s personal websites. Where they, well, describe what they’re working on right now.
AboutIdeasNow does the same, but also includes “/about” and “/ideas”.
We list about 3500 personal websites in our directory, including all kinds of people like writers, musicians, artists, and us normal human beings.
The most recently pages turn up on the front page, and you can search across them all if you’re looking for someone who’s thinking about same ideas as you.
For the full motivation of what the different “/about”, “/ideas”, and “/now” pages are for, I’d refer you to the manifesto which took us way too long to write down.
There’s also a much bigger topic: You know, social media encourages all kinds of bad behaviour, and we think personal websites might be solution.
February 2024—We told people about the project on Hacker News and a few other places, and got encouraging feedback:
“It feels pretty magical to immediately find people across the Internet who have most likely “gone deep” on something I also have.”
Which made it all worth it.
January 2026—Nice surprise: people are still using the site!
Nick Gray reached out very kindly to help fix issues with the crawler. Maybe that’s the start of revisiting the project?
