I first stumbled upon this a couple of weeks ago at perishablepress.com and really liked the idea… Some of you are probably familiar with the robots.txt file that sits in your domain’s root folder, giving instructions to web crawlers and spiders, telling them which pages to index and so forth. (You can find out more about it at www.robotstxt.org.)

Thats about “robots.txt”, so what about “humans.txt”?

Well a website is usually intended to be used by humans, and these humans are relational beings, often interested in the humans behind a great project or idea.

The humans.txt file, is located in the domain’s root folder just like the robots.txt, but it contains information about the humans that have made a website possible. It lists information about the team; their names, contact information, location etc. (but only if they wish to add it). It can contain a list of people you would like to thank, when it was last updated, the standards used, its components or the software you used to create the site… All this information can be added to humans.txt.

There is a standard for humans.txt and you can find out more information about the humans.txt initiative at humanstxt.org.

My humans.txt can be found at mrkiffie.com/humans.txt

Hope you enjoy.

KiFFiE

Note:

The humans.txt file should not be confused with a sitemap as it does not control what humans users are able to see on your site.