Artifacts of the Small Web
patternsof.design
A Website by Nick Trombleymaya.land
an old-school blogroll, now with banners 😎
Every element is an html.
A Website by Katherine Yanghome sweet homepage
A Website by Amy Wibowoa comic about growing up online
Good Things
A Website by Melanie Richards155-217-155
A Website by Nick Trombleye-worm.club
A Website by Zach ShermanI’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.
drawing.garden
A Website by Ben MorenGardening, but with emojis and less time.
Marginalia Search
A WebsiteI 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.
emojraw.glitch.me (draw!)
A Website by Shannon Linminimator.app
An ApplicationMinimator 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.
Looseleaf
A Websitepicnic.lectoro.me
A Website by Renan Le CaroCreate a text document, share the link and edit it with friends.
Can I include?
A WebsiteThis site helps you understand which tag you can include in another using the WHATWG HTML specification.
How I experience the web today
A WebsiteLoveFrom,
A WebsiteLoveFrom,
is a creative
collective.press.stripe.com
A WebsiteStripe 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.
Make Frontend Shit Again
A Website by Sara VieiraWe 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!Things that don't scale
An Article by Benedict EvansMaybe 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?
AJDVIV
A WebsiteSeriesHeat
A Website by Jim VallandinghamSearch for a TV Series to see a heatmap of average IMDb ratings for each episode.
Kicks Condor: barnsworthburning
An Article by Kicks CondorDirectories 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.
So many little design helper sites!
An Article by Chris CoyierI’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?
Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours
A Website by Nicholas RougeuxA recreation of the original 1821 color guidebook with new cross references, photographic examples, and posters designed by Nicholas Rougeux.
The Whimsical Web
A Website by Max BöckA curated list of sites with an extra bit of fun.
Funcooker
A WebsiteUser Inyerface
A WebsiteA worst-practice UI experiment.
SEA — SEASONS
A Website by Melanie RichardsWith 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.
Lizzo's Juice Shop
A WebsiteThis page is a truly naked, brutalist html quine
An Article by Leon BambrickI 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."
littlebigdetails
A Blog by Floris DekkerLittle 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.
Color Controversy
A Website by Leo RobinovitchSo 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!
this vs. that
A Website by Phuoc NguyenIf we were allowed to visit
A Poetry CollectionIf 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.
When all of my friends are on at once
A Website by Laurel SchwulstMemories of being online
tixy.land
A Websitesin(t * x) * cos(t * y)
Creative code golfing.
tree.fm
A WebsiteTune Into Forests From Around The World. Escape, Relax & Preserve.
Games For Crows: Feels
A GameA Library Demand List
A Website by Robin SloanThis 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.
The small web is beautiful
An Essay by Ben HoytI 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.
Telescopic Text
A Websitetelescopictext.org is an experimental tool for creating expanding texts. It is based on telescopictext.com.
sodelightful.com
A Website by Christina TranI'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.
Simon Collison's timeline
A Website by Simon CollisonI’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.
Nested
A WebsiteI have a secret for you
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!
...and by islands I mean paragraphs
A Website by J.R. CarpenterIslands 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.
HTML Elements Memory Test
A WebsiteMy first attempt was 54. Not even half!
How many HTML elements can you remember?
aboutfeeds.com
A Website by Matt WebbUse 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.
The life and death of an internet onion
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?
Rethinking Repair
This chapter is an exercise in broken world thinking. It asks what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology and new media.
The modern infrastructural ideal
The form and possibility of the "modern infrastructural ideal" is increasingly under threat, as cracks (sometimes literal ones) show up in our bridges, our highways, our airports, and the nets of our social welfare systems. For these and other reasons, broken world thinking asserts that breakdown, dissolution, and change, rather than innovation, development, or design as conventionally practices and thought about are the key themes and problems facing new media and technology scholarship today.
Attached to this, however, comes a second and more hopeful approach: namely, a deep wonder and appreciation for the ongoing activities by which stability (such as it is) is maintained, the subtle arts of repair by which rich and robust lives are sustained against the weight of centrifugal odds, and how sociotechnical forms and infrastructures, large and small, get not only broken but restored, one not-so-metaphoric brick at a time.
The fulcrum of these two worlds
Here, then, are two radically different forces and realities. On one hand, a fractal world, a centrifugal world, and always-almost-falling-apart world. On the other, a world in constant process of fixing and reinvention, reconfiguring and reassembling into new combinations and new possibilities...the fulcrum of these two worlds is repair.
A creature of bones, not words
In building connections, [articulation work] builds meaning and identity, sorting out ontologies on the fly rather than mixing and matching between fixed and stable entities. Articulation lives first and foremost in practice, not representation; as its proper etymology suggests, it's a creature of bones, not words. When articulation fails, systems seize up, and our sociotechnical worlds become stuff, arthritic, unworkable.
The world is always breaking
So the world is always breaking; it's in its nature to break.
A side that goes unrecognized
Edward Burtynsky, Shipbreaking #4.
Burtynsky's [shipbreaking] photos tell us important things about the themes of breakdown, maintenance, and repair raised here. The first is the extent to which such work is rendered invisible under our normal modes of picturing and theorizing technology. Burtynsky's photos share, in exquisite detail, a side or moment of technological life that goes for the most part unrecognized.
If we are to understand maintenance, repair, and technology more broadly, scenes such as Burtynsky's must be made empirically and conceptually familiar, even normal.
Turned into other things
Ask yourself this: for all the representations of great ships in history you've encountered, at what times and in what forms have you seen such vessels? In almost every instance it will be at moments of birth, or at the heights of strength and glory: the christening before the maiden voyage, rounding the cape, facing down the Spanish fleet, and so on. But what happens (or happened) to these ships? Save for the special cases of hostile sinking, shipwreck, or honorable retirement and preservation, it was this: they were disassembled, repurposed, stripped, and turned into other things.
An engine of technological difference
Whether at the level of national "technological styles" that shape and differentiate the nature of "same" technologies in different national contexts, or the simple but consequential variations by which industrial commodities are brought into, enlivened, and sustained within the circumstances of individual homes and lives, repair may constitute an important engine by which technological difference is produced and fit is accomplished.
The internet grew by breaking
The Internet grew by breaking, bumping up against the limits of existing protocols and practices and working around them, leaving behind almost by accident some of the properties that we now enumerate as key and distinctive virtues of the Internet as infrastructural form. Far from being a generalized cultural tendency or a property of individual minds, innovation in the technology space, as in culture more generally, is therefore organized around problems. This makes innovation simultaneously specific and in some measure collective in nature. And its engine is breakdown and repair.
What the fixer knows
Can repair sites and repair actors claim special insight or knowledge, by virtue of their positioning vis-à-vis the worlds of technology they engage? Can the fixer know and see different things—indeed, different worlds—than the better-known figures of "designer" or "user"?
Tool-being
Take Heidegger's notion of "tool-being", built around the central distinction between tools that are "ready-to-hand" versus "present-at-hand".
In the former state, technologies function as anticipated, do and stay where they're supposed to, and therefore sink below the level of conscious reflection. In the latter, the material world resists, obstructs, or frustrates action, and therefore calls attention to itself (precisely because we must now work to figure out and overcome barriers in our no-longer seamless world).
An ethics of mutual care
Foregrounding maintenance and repair as an aspect of technological work invites not only new functional but also moral relations to the world of technology. It references what is in fact a very old but routinely forgotten relationship of humans to things in the world: namely, an ethics of mutual care and responsibility.
To love deeply a world of things
Care brings the worlds of action and meaning back together, and reconnects the necessary work of maintenance with the forms of attachment that so often (but invisibly, at least to analysts) sustain it.
...What if we care about our technologies, and do so in more than a trivial way? This feature or property has sometimes been extended to technologies in the past, but usually only ones that come out of deep folk or craft traditions, and rarely the products of a modern industrial culture.
...Is it possible to love, and love deeply, a world of things?
We live in the aftermath
So do we live in later modernity, postmodernity, alternative modernity, or liquid modernity? Knowledge societies, information societies, network societies, or risk societies? New media, old media, dead media, or hypermedia? The world of information, the world of search, the world of networks, or the or the world of big data?
The answer is simple: like every generation before, we live in the aftermath.