Why an almanac, not an awesome list
Awesome lists rot silently. A directory earns its keep by curating, pruning, and telling you when something was last verified.
Every corner of the self-hosted web has an awesome list. They start well: one maintainer, strong opinions, a few dozen carefully chosen entries. Then the pull requests arrive. Two years later the list has nine hundred rows, a third of them pointing at archived repositories, and no way to tell which third.
An almanac works differently. It is a maintained instrument, not an append-only log.
Curation is deletion
The value of a directory is mostly in what it leaves out. Every entry here was submitted, reviewed by a person, and can be unpublished the day a project goes unmaintained. The moderation queue is not a formality — most submissions do not make it through.
Records carry their provenance
Each listing shows when it was logged and how often sailors actually follow the bearing (outbound clicks). A tool nobody has visited in a year tells you something a star count never will.
Categories are plates, not tags
Tags multiply; plates do not. The category set is deliberately small and numbered like the plates of a printed atlas, so browsing stays legible even as the collection grows. Tags exist for cross-cutting detail — the plates are the spine.
None of this is complicated. It is just work, done on a schedule, the way an almanac has always been produced. That is the whole idea.