However, it became a bit annoying adding new vouches to the json manually.

So today I sat down and made it get created automatically during my page build powered by Hugo, based on a list of vouches stored in a vouches.yaml data file¹.

For this I first created said data file in data/vouches.yaml:

- url: https://food.foosel.net
  date: "2026-03-14"
- url: https://chaos.social/@foosel
  date: "2026-03-14"
- url: https://octoprint.org
  date: "2026-03-14"
# ...

Then I created a new output format humanjson in my config.yaml, making sure to also add it to the home page:

outputs:
  home:
    - HTML
    - JSON
    - humanjson
  # ...

outputFormats:
  # ...
  humanjson:
    mediaType: application/json
    baseName: human
    isPlainText: true
    notAlternative: true
  # ...

Finally I created a template for that in _layout/home.humanjson.json:

{
    "version": "0.1.1",
    "url": {{ .Site.BaseURL | jsonify }},
    "vouches": [
    {{- range $index, $vouch := hugo.Data.vouches }}
    {{- with $vouch }}
        {{- if $index }},{{end}}
        {
            "url": {{ .url | jsonify }},
            "vouched_at": {{ .date | jsonify }}
        }
    {{- end }}
    {{- end }}
    ]
}

I kept the required <link rel="/human.json"> in my layouts/partials/extend_head.html file that gets included on all pages by my theme (contrary to how the linking of output formats work, which is why I went with notAlternative: true for that).

And to make it even easier to quickly add a new vouch, I also added a new task to my Taskfile:

  add-vouch:
    desc: Adds a new vouch to human.json.
    vars:
      PAGE: '{{.CLI_ARGS}}'
      FILE: 'data/vouches.yaml'
      TODAY: '{{now | date "2006-01-02"}}'
    cmds:
      - |
        cat >> {{.FILE}} <<EOF
        - url: {{.PAGE}}
          date: "{{.TODAY}}"
        EOF

Now, vouching for a page² is as easy as

task add-vouch -- https://example.com

human.json is a lightweight protocol for humans to assert authorship of their site content and vouch for the humanity of others. It uses URL ownership as identity, and trust propagates through a crawlable web of vouches between sites.

Basically, a web of trust to confirm that pages are written by actual human beings vs just LLM generated slop.

That idea certainly clicked with me and so I quickly threw together a basic human.json in this page’s static folder and linked to it from the layouts/partials/extend_head.html override file. That will get filled more over time 😊

And as reading through the spec of human.json also made me learn about the /ai slashpage I added that as well and linked it from the footer.

Those slashpages are a fun idea I’ll have to investigate further too!