HN Popularity Contest

What counts as a personal blog?

• I count a site as a personal blog if:

• the site contains written content (not just an app or a video)

• the site is authored by a single person

• A blog still counts as a personal blog even if the blogger is a professional journalist (e.g., Brian Krebs) or blogging on their company’s website (e.g., Raymond Chen).

• Social media (Twitter / Mastodon) doesn’t count as a personal blog.

• Podcasts websites count as blogs if they’re hosted by a single person and are independently owned.

• I exclude github.com links even though some people post blogs there.

• It’s too hard to filter out all the non-blog links to github.com.

• Pages under the github.io domain are eligible.

Aggregating scores

• I aggregate scores across all submissions that received a score of at least 20 and are not dead or deleted.

• e.g., If a single link was submitted 100 times and never scored at least 20, none of those submissions would increase the aggregate score for the domain.

• Duplicate submissions of the same URL all count as long as each submission received at least 20 points.

• I aggregate together domains when the author moved domains as long as the new domain is the canonical URL for the old content.

• e.g., all submissions from christine.website count towards xeiaso.net, their new canonical URL.

• I do not aggregate together blogs by the same author at different domains if they contain distinct content.

• e.g., kalzumeus.com and bitsaboutmoney.com count separately, even though Patrick McKenzie is the author of both.

• To reduce the size of the dataset, I only include domains that have accumulated at least 500 points across all submissions.

Update frequency

The data automatically updates on the second day of each month, but I sometimes do out of band updates.