Artifacts of the Small Web

an old-school blogroll, now with banners 😎

a comic about growing up online

I’m building a custom pleroma client so that my friends and I can have a cute, self-hosted social network to post about politics and art. Besides being much more visually interesting than our facebook messenger groupchat, e-worm also attempts to solve design problems around conversational, collaborative thinking. The biggest of these problems is the inherent ephemerality of our groupchat— it doesn’t really succeed as a collaborative thinking space because it has no long-term memory. When messages are constantly buried under new ones, it places the burden on us to remember previous conversations. So the ultimate design goal for e-worm is to create a self-archiving conversational interface that preserves thought and helps us keep thinking new things rather than going in intellectual circles.

Gardening, but with emojis and less time.

I want to show you that that Internet you used to go exploring is still very much there. There are still tons of small personal websites, and a wealth of long form text from both the past and the present.

So it's a search engine. It's perhaps not the greatest at finding what you already knew was there, instead it is designed to help you find some things you didn't even know you were looking for.

Minimator is a minimalist graphical editor.

All drawings are made of lines in a grid based canvas. The lines are limited to vertical and horizontal lines, and quarter circles.

Create a text document, share the link and edit it with friends.

This site helps you understand which tag you can include in another using the WHATWG HTML specification.

LoveFrom,
is a creative
collective.

Stripe partners with millions of the world’s most innovative businesses. These businesses are the result of many different inputs. Perhaps the most important ingredient is “ideas.”

Stripe Press highlights ideas that we think can be broadly useful. Some books contain entirely new material, some are collections of existing work reimagined, and others are republications of previous works that have remained relevant over time or have renewed relevance today.

We used to make websites because it was fun but at some point, we lost the way.

We need to make dumb shit!
Make useless stuff;
make the web fun again!

Maybe the internet is due for a wave of things that don’t scale at all. In that light, I’ve been fascinated by ‘Morioka Shoten’ in Tokyo - a bookshop that sells only one book at a time. This is retail as anti-logistics - as a reaction against the firehose, and the infinite replication of Amazon. Before the internet that would only work in a very dense city, but, again, the internet is the densest city on earth, so how far do we scale the unscalable?

Search for a TV Series to see a heatmap of average IMDb ratings for each episode.

Directories aren’t surging. There isn’t this nascent directory movement fomenting - ready to take on the world. Directories aren’t trending.

But there is a certainly really sweet little directory community now. From the Marijn-inspired stuff listed in Directory Uprising to the link-sharing ‘yesterweb’ collected around sadgrl.online - or the originals at Indieseek and i.webthings.

Barnsworthburning (by Nick Trombley) is a very formidable addition to this community - a clean, multilayered design and an innovative bidirectional index.

I’m sure y’all find these things just as useful as I do. They don’t make us lazy, they make us efficient. I know how to make a pattern. I know how to draw a curve with a Pen Tool. I know how to convert SVG into JSX. But using a dedicated tool makes me faster and better at it. And sometimes I don’t know how to do those things, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take advantage. Fake it ’til you make it, right?

A recreation of the original 1821 color guidebook with new cross references, photographic examples, and posters designed by Nicholas Rougeux.

A curated list of sites with an extra bit of fun.

A worst-practice UI experiment.

With the many distractions life has to offer, it is all too easy to let the seasons slip by and wonder where an entire year has gone. This site is an effort to observe the seasons with intentionality. Each season documents ways to observe the moment, pulling often from pagan traditions.

I decided to make a truly naked, brutalist html page, that is itself a quine. And this page is it.

Viewing the source of this page should reveal a page identical to the page you are now seeing. Nothing is hidden. It's a true "What you see is what you get."

Little Big Details is a curated collection of the finer details of design.

As Charles & Ray Eames put it:

“The details are not the details; they make the product.”

This is intended to be a source of inspiration.

Created and curated by Floris Dekker. Alumni: Andrew McCarthy.

So some friends and I were talking about colors one day and how we all see colors a bit differently and how that's neat.

But is there a color that is interpreted differently THE MOST? Is there a most controversial color? Well, (if I contrive an ongoing survey and collect data about it), the answer is yes, of course!

If We Were Allowed To Visit is an anthology of poems by Gemma Mahadeo rendered by Ian MacLarty.

As you move through the game's environment, the poems are rearranged into the shapes of the objects they're about, each frame becoming a new generative poem.

Memories of being online

Creative code golfing.

Tune Into Forests From Around The World. Escape, Relax & Preserve.

This visualization takes the current New York Times Best Sellers list for combined print and e-book fiction and scales each title according to the demand for its e-book edition at a collection of U.S. public libraries, selected for their size and geographic diversity.

I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the “small web” as well as the small software and architectures that power it.

telescopictext.org is an experimental tool for creating expanding texts. It is based on telescopictext.com.

I'm Christina Tran. If you want to trace the trails I've made in the world through the intermittent marks left on the interwebs, below is a map of my becoming in no particular order. But I also hope we get the chance to share a meal, explore nature, experience art, and/or create something together sometime. Because we are all multi-faceted, multi-dimensional beings who can't be TL;DR'd.

I’ve shaped this timeline over five months. It might look simple, but it most definitely was not. I liken it to chipping away at a block of marble, or the slow process of evolving a painting, or constructing a poem; endless edits, questions, doubling back, doubts. It was so good to have something meaty to get stuck into, but sometimes it was awful, and many times I considered throwing it away. Overall it was challenging, fun, and worth the effort.

A strange universe-expanding game that's been described as "whoah dude".

Explore procedural galaxies, land on unknown planets, read the thoughts of every living thing, rummage through people's pockets, and more!

Islands are possible only in literature. Topical islands are in a time without History. They are paragraphs. They are not part of the central body of the text. Isloated writing is always a testimonial. The castaway embodies the contradiction of beieng a speaker without a society.

How many HTML elements can you remember?

Use feeds to subscribe to websites and get the latest content in one place.

Feeds put you in control. It’s like subscribing to a podcast, or following a company on Facebook. You don’t need to pay or hand over your email address. And you get the latest content without having to visit lots of sites, and without cluttering up your inbox. Had enough? Unsubscribe from the feed.

You just need a special app called a newsreader.

This site explains how to get started.

In her piece "A drop of love in the cloud" (2018), artist Fei Liu writes about the like/heart button as a flattening affordance of giving affirmation and love. The text-editor provides a much more expressive input.

But even people who can't communicate well because of language barriers can express love through actions, like cooking food. Can we create other "love inputs" that might allow us to "reach across the chasm of a seamless signal"?

What is expressing "real" love or affirmation about? Is it about effort, thoughtfulness, generosity, something else? What might a thoughtful or generous interface feel or behave like?