✨ redesigned the /about page
The about page got a full redesign. A bigger hero, cards showing real /friends pages from the directory, a better AI prompt section, and a bunch of mobile fixes.
Changelog
Here's a rough diary of all the updates I've been making to slashfriends.org. New sites show up here automatically as soon as they're added to the directory.
Monday, July 13, 2026
🔗 1 new site added
Welcome to sujeetbhalerao.com.
Sunday, July 12, 2026
🔗 11 new sites added
Welcome to deepakness.com, iamjoshwalker.com, visakanv.com, joshualelon.com, hornsby.co, neddwyer.com, seanbonner.com, trangla.de, reza.so, decafquest.com, and keshavatearth.com.
🧹 the great favicon outage
Every favicon on the site broke this morning. A caching bug in my icon proxy was corrupting the images, so every site showed a blank square. Fixed, and I wrote a postmortem.
Here's how favicons work here, because it's kind of neat. Every icon is proxied through this site at /fav/yourdomain.com and cached at the edge for a day, so your browser never talks to Google's favicon service directly. And when a site has no favicon at all, Google returns a tiny generic globe. I detect that and swap in a yellow monogram tile with the first letter of the domain instead. Here are some from the directory:
🛡️ spam guard
Sketchy submissions now get held as pending, and I approve or deny them from an email. I also turned on Cloudflare Turnstile on the submit form. Real people only, please.
🎲 better browsing
The random page button got smarter. "Next page" now cycles through every site in order, so you see each one exactly once per lap. And sites that block iframes get a nice fallback card instead of an error. Nerdy detail: before embedding a site, my crawler reads its X-Frame-Options and Content-Security-Policy headers to see if the site allows being shown in an iframe. Sites that say no get the card instead, and the card even quotes the exact header that blocked it.
🔍 SEO tune-up
Canonical URLs, per-page descriptions, JSON-LD structured data, and 301 redirects to kill trailing slashes. Boring but important. Robots deserve clean URLs too.
🧰 small stuff
Added a proper confirmation page after you submit your site. Put browse in the nav. Added privacy-friendly analytics from Plausible.
Saturday, July 11, 2026
🔗 6 new sites added
Welcome to usemorepaper.com, nickbuilds.ai, matthandzel.com, ianmackey.com, nayamoss.com, and samgaddis.com.
🏠 new homepage cards
The homepage got brand new cards: a yellow banner, a stamp-framed favicon, and a hard black border. I call the design "Banner bold" and it took five rounds of mockups to get there.
⭐ the FEATURED badge
Sites whose /friends page links back here (or to my site) now get a little FEATURED badge on their card. Linking out is generous. Linking back is friendly.
🤖 copy-paste AI prompt
There's now a prompt you can copy and hand to an AI agent, and it will build your /friends page for you. It's at the bottom of the homepage and on the about page.
📡 for the robots
Added an RSS feed at /feed.xml, a public JSON dump at /sites.json, an llms.txt for the AI agents, a sitemap, a social share image, and a proper 404 page. The machines are well fed. Here's that share image: 
⚡ speed obsession
This site has no JavaScript framework, and all the CSS gets inlined into the page at build time, so there are zero render-blocking requests. Combined with the same-origin favicon proxy, the whole thing loads in about one round trip. PageSpeed likes it a lot.
Friday, July 10, 2026
🔗 6 new sites added
Welcome to quinnsaysyes.com, jesse.id, austinsaylor.com, tylervawser.com, joshdance.com, and alexanderexum.com.
🔧 crawler fixes for Substack
Some Substack-hosted /friends pages were failing verification because Substack blocks robot-looking requests. My checker now sends a browser-flavored request and retries politely on 429 and 403 errors. If your submission failed before, try again.
While I'm here, some detail on the crawler: it visits every listed site once a day to make sure the page is still live, pulls the title and a short excerpt for the directory card, decodes messy HTML entities, and notices when a /friends page links back here. Sites that link back get the FEATURED badge on the homepage.
Thursday, July 9, 2026
🔗 1 new site added
Welcome to nickgray.net. I built this directory, so by default I guess my /friends page was the first to be included. Nepotism!
🚀 launched slashfriends.org
Day one! I built and launched this directory, and the whole thing runs on Cloudflare:
- ⛅ Cloudflare Workers serves every page. The site is built with Astro and deploys as a single Worker.
- 🗄️ D1 is the little SQL database that holds every listing.
- ⏰ Cron Triggers re-check every site daily to make sure the pages are still live.
- 🛡️ Turnstile keeps spam bots off the submit form, with no annoying puzzles for humans.
- 📬 Email Routing and Email Sending handle the confirmation emails.