Tell about the website creators using humans.txt
I check the analytics of this blog every week, especially the ‘Top resources not found’ section. Just to be sure that I have no broken links. This week, I found strange requests to the /humans.txt file. I’ve added /robots.txt before, but why somebody tries to open /humans.txt?
We are people, not machines
I found the answer on humanstxt.org. It’s a really cool initiative to add info about all the creators of the website.
We are always saying that, but the only file we generate is one full of additional information for the searchbots: robots.txt. Then why not doing one for ourselves?
And that’s true. So I’ve added such file to my blog.
Also, I found a lot of websites that already use the file in different ways.
- Google added
humans.txtto their domain almost ten years ago. - GitHub redirects requests to this file to their ‘About’ page.
- Evil Martians made redirect from
humans.txttomartians.txtwith the same format.
How to?
- Add the file
humans.txtto the root of your site. - Add info about all the site creators to this file.
- Add
<link rel="author" href="/humans.txt">to the<head>.
Read more: humans.txt: Quick start
Automation
I want to keep the section /* THANKS */ with the list of all contributors actual. So I’ve added some automation to update the list on every local build:
- Get data from
git shortlog -sne.sis for summary only,eis for contributors emails,nis for the number of commits. - Remove contributors with my emails from the list.
- Save the list to data file.
- Put the list to
humans.txton every build.
Resources
Webmentions [?] (likes: 33, reposts: 7)
On @evilmartians website, humans.txt redirects to another file evilmartians.com/martians.txt