Changelog

Almost nobody finds the browse page, the StumbleUpon-style viewer that flips through everyone's /friends pages. But the few who do click through almost five pages each. Best engagement on the site, worst discovery.

So today the site got more doors into it:

• The homepage grid has a yellow card after every 12 sites that says "Take me to a random page" (the label rotates).
• The browse bar has little Prev // Next links, so you can walk backward too.
• The about page, the bottom of the homepage index, and the card you see when a site can't be embedded all link into browse now.
• When your site gets listed, the confirmation email shows you your own spot in the rotation.

I also removed the search box from the homepage. It only searched titles and short excerpts, so searching "Texas" found nobody, including me. Your browser's find-on-page works better.

When you browse, a site either shows up right on the page or, if it blocks embedding, you get a card with a link instead. It turns out about 20 of the blocked sites are ones my own team manages at personalwebsites.org, and our own security header was blocking us too. One header change later, sites like adambuice.com, erinwarner.net, and danlerman.com open right inside the browse view.

88 of the 113 listed sites embed now, up from 69. Most of the rest are on platforms like Substack and Squarespace that block embedding for everybody.

A bunch of /friends cards here showed a plain gray letter instead of a person, because the site has no favicon. Other sites had tiny default icons. (Even my own site had an American flag icon, which I think is cool.)

But this directory is about people, and faces are better!

So today I fired up some agents to go looking for real photos. I think we'll only share pictures you already published yourself, on your homepage, your about page, or a social profile your own site links to. The agents cropped each one square, ran some sort of face-center algo on the images, then emailed everyone to ask permission before posting. Here's the actual email:

From Nick Gray <nick@slashfriends.org>Subject A better icon for anne-laure.net on slashfriends.org?

Hey Anne-Laure, your site anne-laure.net is listed on slashfriends.org. I will be buying an ad to promote the site on a popular newsletter this weekend or next week.

But right now, your card shows a plain letter A. I found this photo of you on your X profile and I think it'd look way better:

A

Yes, I approve this photo swap.
No, let me give you another image.
No, please just keep the existing one.

If you do nothing at all, nothing changes.

Thanks,
Nick

Within a few hours, 15 of the 27 people I emailed had clicked yes, and nobody has said no. Here are a few of the swaps:

A→

anne-laure.net

Q→

quinnsaysyes.com

C→

chriscarey.vision

→

nickgray.net

→

sujeetbhalerao.com

→

ryanbed.org

For nerds: we used OpenCV's Haar-cascade face detection to find and center each face, then saved 128px WebP icons. Approvals are one-click tokenized links on a Cloudflare Worker, with the decisions in a D1 database, replacement photos uploading to R2, and the permission emails going out through Cloudflare Email Service. An approved photo activates instantly, no redeploy.

It turns out /friends pages are not my idea. The IndieWeb community has been making personal websites that link to each other for years, and their wiki already lists /friends as a kind of page you can have. Lukas Rosenstock emailed me to point this out, and I think someone over there added slashfriends.org to the wiki. I have a profile there now too. Great community. Go look.

Lukas also pointed me at rel="friend", a small attribute you can put on a link to say this is a person I actually know. Nice idea, and you should add it if you like it. I am not going to require it. The only thing you need to get listed here is a real page at yourdomain.com/friends.

Two people updated their site's favicon and the directory kept showing the old one. Zach Ware's card showed a purple square when his site has an American flag, and K. Elizabeth Coggins's showed a generic gray cube instead of her photo.

Turns out I was getting every icon from Google's favicon service, and Google's copy can go stale for months. DuckDuckGo has an icon service too, and it fetches your site's actual current favicon. So now I ask DuckDuckGo first and only fall back to Google when DuckDuckGo comes up empty. I tested it by hammering their service with all 87 sites at once from my server, four times in a row, and it never once complained.

Nerdy detail: DuckDuckGo hands back your original favicon file, which is what makes it fresh, but originals can be huge. One site's icon is a 108KB PNG. Anything over 30KB still gets Google's tiny resized version instead, so the homepage stays fast.

A friend emailed me: he built a /friends page, submitted it here, and got rejected. News to me. When a submission failed, my system told the submitter and then forgot it ever happened. He only got listed because he happened to know me.

His page was real, and good. But his site builds itself entirely with JavaScript, so my crawler sees an empty page no matter what. I added him by hand, and now every rejected submission gets logged with the reason, and a nightly email shows me what bounced. If the system turns someone away by mistake, I'll actually know about it.

A 2012 blog post got listed as a /friends page this morning. Someone submitted a site whose WordPress guessed at the URL instead of 404ing, so /friends quietly redirected to an old post that happened to be titled "Friends". It was a real page with real links out, so every check I had passed it.

I was only checking that the redirect landed on a URL with "friends" somewhere in it, and /2012/07/friends.html clears that bar. Now the redirect has to land on an actual /friends page, and anything else gets held for me to look at. Redirecting to www still works fine, and so does Blogger and Substack putting their pages at /p/friends.

When a submission gets held and its page doesn't link back to me, I now have an AI read the page and decide whether it's genuinely a list of other people's websites or just an essay about friendship. If it's clearly not a /friends page, you get told right away instead of waiting on me. Nothing gets saved, so you can fix your page and resubmit immediately.

It only gets to say no, never yes. Anything it thinks is fine still comes to me to look at, because a wrong no just means you email me and I sort it out, while a wrong yes would sit on the homepage with nobody watching. It also has to actually be able to read your page. If your /friends page builds itself with JavaScript, my crawler sees an empty page, and "I can't read this" is not the same as "this is bad". Those still come to me.

If your page links back to me, none of this runs at all. You've already told me what the page is.

I wrote an article about /friends pages over on my other website, The Friendship Recession. It's about what a /friends page actually is, why I made one for myself, and why I liked the idea enough to go build this whole directory.

FThe Friendship RecessionWhy Every Personal Website Needs a /friends PageA /friends page is a list of the people you know and like, at yourdomain.com/friends. Here's why I built one, why I made a directory of them, and how to make yours.Read the article →

You don't have to read it. But I made a bunch of illustrations for it, and those I do want to show off.

I now check that your /friends page is actually a page. Some sites answer every URL with the same thing, so /friends looked real but was just a copy of their homepage. Now I also ask the site for a URL that can't possibly exist. If that comes back looking the same as /friends, then there's nothing there, and the submission doesn't get listed.

Nerdy detail: it compares the visible text of the two pages, not the raw HTML. Hashing the markup doesn't work, because one of the sites I caught this way hands back slightly different bytes on every single request. Strip the tags out and the two pages are word for word identical.

I gave the cards on the homepage and the about page a new look. The old ones had a big yellow banner and a white frame around each favicon. The new ones lead with the domain in bold, show the favicon cleanly with no frame, and sit on a hard black drop shadow that pops when you hover over them. The FEATURED badge moved to a little ribbon stitched into the corner.

Before

Rreubeningber.com/friendsFEATURED

Friends | Reuben Ingber

---

These are some of my internet friends.

Mmolodtsov.me/friends

The blogroll of websites I love reading

---

A blog roll of websites I enjoy following.

After

FEATURED

Rreubeningber.com/friends

Friends | Reuben Ingber

These are some of my internet friends.

Mmolodtsov.me/friends

The blogroll of websites I love reading

A blog roll of websites I enjoy following.

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:

SJLJKMJRLDEE

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.