Web
Surfing!

Some totally tubular links.

Something to know about me is that I love web surfing. Like, when I first learned about RSS feeds in the 2000s I was quite confused as to why people would deprive themselves of the fun of typing in the URL and exploring a webpage regardless of whether anything had been posted to it lately. (Do not let my ornery nonsense put you off RSS feeds, they are fine, just not my cup of tea.) Anyway, get ready to shred some gnarly digital waves.

Neocities

Layout templates

Just because templates didn't work out for me doesn't mean other people shouldn't use them. They're literally made to be used by people.

Learning to code

I listed some sources that helped me on my home page, but here are some more.

A11y (web accessibility)

  • A11y Coffee: Intro to web accessibility.
  • A11y Tools: A random collection of accessibility-focused tools that you might find at least partially useful.
  • Random A11y: Endless collection of accessible color combos.

Fun coding stuff:

  • Sunday Sites: A place to write code and socialize on a Sunday every month. Sadly, by the time I discovered it they seem like they already stopped doing it, but they archived the prompts and some of the sites they made.
  • Just For Fun: A showcase of creative coding projects.
  • Want inspiration for a layout? Check the Web Design Museum
  • 32bit Cafe: An online community for adults to converge in safe-for-work discussions about the webweaving, webcrafting, website-building hobby that focuses on self-expression and art without heavily focusing on that "old web" aesthetic or focusing on nostalgia.

The small, indie, personal web

  • Switching.Software: Ethical, easy-to-use and privacy-conscious alternatives to well-known software.
  • Reweirding* the Web: An article, which cites a lot of related articles.
  • My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be? An essay.
  • Tiny Internet is a research inquiry, prototyping exploration, and budding internet collective that attempts to answer the question: How can we make the web more natural and human-first rather than computers or institutions? How do we wish to interact with the internet beyond browsing? How would we shape the internet and our container for inhabiting it (currently, our browsers) if they were our neighborhoods and homes?
  • (we)bsite: A living collection of internet letters from people like you, inhabitants of the internet. Very wholesome, takes a moment to load because there are lots of letters.
  • Fediverse.party: A guide into the world of decentralized, autonomous networks running on free open software on a myriad of servers across the world.
  • Archive95 is an independent web archive with the goal of preserving early web content that predates or has otherwise gone under the radar of more mainstream web archives. This is primarily achieved through a bygone genre of CD-ROMs that provided offline approximations of the internet for those who weren't yet connected, and now serve as valuable time capsules of what the web once was.
  • Daryl Sun's Links: Great cyber-security links, plus other stuff.
  • The Forest: Takes you to random small-web sites.
  • Ye Olde Blogroll: A human-curated list of personal blogs and sites that are updated regularly.

Smart sites for smart people

  • Murderous Maths: Actually making maths fun by involving 1920s Chicago gangsters, aliens, fantasy barbarians and wizards, mad scientists, and other such characters in various violent, wacky hijinks. I say this as someone who is not very good at maths: it was a great time. Plus, that page is refusing to bend to modern web design and I respect the hell out of that.
  • brisray.com an interesting personal site about history and computers. I like his postcard collection. Website has been around since 1999 and is still updated.
  • Let's learn together! Neocities page with lots of guides about various topics.
  • Bjorn: Bioarcheology.
  • Venezuela e historia: Blog sobre figuras historicas de Venezuela.
  • The Pudding: explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays. We’re not chasing current events or clickbait. We choose topics where visuals inform and entertain. We’ve been in the business of bringing you stories you didn’t know you needed since 2017.

Other fun sites

  • Rotating Sandwiches: YES! YESSS! It is exactly that! It delivers what it promises!
  • Condiment Packet: The mechanisms behind this archive have been a dedicated and considered effort to document, categorize, and present condiment packets. I tried to do this in a way that keeps a historic snapshot while keeping things fun and easy to visualize. It is enthralling to me that such a serious online museum archive exists for something like this.
  • Starring the computer: Computers in movies and TV.
  • The Old Robots: A collection of robots and robot pictures from the 1940s to the early 2000s.
  • La lonchera de los recuerdos: Blog sobre los 90s y los 2000s.

Make some noise!

  • Cities and Memory: is one of the world’s biggest sound projects, covering 130 countries and territories with more than 7000 sounds and more than 2000 contributing artists.
  • Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA's actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. (I had fun clicking them to make a terrible, noisy racket, too.)
  • Horrorli: Build your own horror atmosphere. Delightful.