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The “small web” is bigger than you might think

kevinboone.me

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Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#201

Post by technothrasher »

101008 wrote: post #36
varun_ch wrote: post #22

A fun trend on the "small web" is the use of 88x31 badges that link to friends websites or in webrings. I have a few on my website, and you can browse a ton of small web websites that way. https://varun.ch (at the bottom of the page) There's also a couple directories/network graphs https://matdoes.dev/buttons https://eightyeightthirty.one/

A beautiful trend that has been going for 30 years ;-) One of the happiest moments of my childhood (I'm exagerating) was when my button was placed in that website that I loved to visit everyday. It was one of the best validations I ever received :)

My similar happy childhood moment was when my home page made the Netscape "Rants and Raves" page for my extensive tribute to Lindsey Wagner (the actress who played the Bionic Woman), and that leading to my local newspaper interviewing me for an article on what the heck this "World Wide Web" was. I went on and on about how the web was revolutionary as an equalizer, allowing anybody to publish and actually be heard without the old barriers to entry. Sounded good, but the web hasn't exactly fully lived up to my vision.

Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#203

Post by senko »

freediver wrote: post #30
8organicbits wrote: post #16

One objection I have to the kagi smallweb approach is the avoidance of infrequently updated sites. Some of my favorite blogs post very rarely; but when they post it's a great read. When I discover a great new blog that hasn't been updated in years I'm excited to add it to my feed reader, because it's a really good signal that when they publish again it will be worth reading.

To clarify criteria is less than 2 years since last blog post.

You may want to clarify that on https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb because the README there says:

> Blog has recent posts (

This may be different than inclusion criteria for websites in general, but on first read it looks like it has to be very active.

I might have missed something while skimming it, but would assume others would miss it as well.

Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#204

Post by ramblin_ray »

mxuribe wrote: post #68
oooyay wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caveat that Kagi gates that repo such that it doesn't allow self-submissions so you're only going to see a chunk of websites that other people have submitted that also know about the Kagi repo.

But per the instructions, it seems like that if one wants to add your own website, then one needs to add 2 other small websites (that are not on the list already)...so technically it does open things up to those who are not aware of the repo...assuming their site is pulled in when someone wants to add their own website. Obviously this scale is slow...but i think that's kinda the point, eh? Nevertheless, for every 1 p…

Thanks for the info!

If anyone wants to join up and add our sites together, here's mine:

https://yesteryearforever.xyz/

Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#205

Post by Terretta »

technothrasher wrote: post #201
101008 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A beautiful trend that has been going for 30 years ;-) One of the happiest moments of my childhood (I'm exagerating) was when my button was placed in that website that I loved to visit everyday. It was one of the best validations I ever received :)

My similar happy childhood moment was when my home page made the Netscape "Rants and Raves" page for my extensive tribute to Lindsey Wagner (the actress who played the Bionic Woman), and that leading to my local newspaper interviewing me for an article on what the heck this "World Wide Web" was. I went on and on about how the web was revolutionary as an equalizer, allowing anybody to publish and actually be heard wit…

Pamphleteering has a storied tradition. Self-publishing remains accessible today.

What confuses me are the reflexive "why would I publish if I'm not getting the ad revenue" and "why would anyone take their time w/o getting paid" type remarks.

Same comments about music: nobody will record songs without getting paid. And games: what's even the point in playing a shooter without dropping loot?

The last one encapsulates the whole problem well.

Over on /r/division2 a majority of players are baffled by a one month only "Realism" mode (all March, worth trying!) that turns off loot boxes and loot drops from tangos. You can solo or co-op the Division 2 Warlords of New York expansion, set in Manhattan, receiving a couple additional base weapons and weapon mods each mission completed. It's refreshing to enjoy beating scenarios while liberated from opening every scrap pile on the street then sorting through inventory for hours.

Gamers on reddit seem universally convinced the gameplay loop for a tactical PvE shooter should be about getting the next loot, rather than executing a mission cleanly or enjoying a strategically cooperative evening with friends defeating a zip code and its boss.

"I won't play a game that's not rewarding." "I won't write a song that doesn't make me a millionaire." "I won't capture my thoughts on a subject unless I get $0.003 an eyeball."

Somewhere we lost just enjoying the play.

Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#206

Post by 8organicbits »

danhite wrote: post #173
8organicbits wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tag cloud part may be a challenge. Web feeds don't always tag their content. I have a blog filter that does something similar ( https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/discover/ ), but the UI I ended up with isn't great and too many things are uncategorized.

Kudos on your site effort and I immediately see your point. In fact I took your topmost entry with no helpful site/update tags and dove in a little to try to understand why a RSS friendly blogger might not be passing along ~ tags for better reader discovery. Turns out my scarce info test case blogger has a mastodon that immediately lists all these tags about himself [I've stripped it down] ... #FrontEnd Developer #CS…

Very cool.

Crawling related sites for tags could work (open graph tags on the website are another good source). I'm wary of mixing data across contexts though. A blog and a Mastodon profile may intend to present a different face to the world or could discuss different topics.

Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#207

Post by sylware »

unsungNovelty wrote: post #152
susam wrote: post #7

A little shell function I have in my ~/.zshrc: pages() { for _ in {1..5}; do curl -sSw '%header{location}\n' https://indieblog.page/random | sed 's/.utm.*//'; done } Here is an example output: $ pages https://alanpearce.eu/post/scriptura/ https://jmablog.com/post/numberones/ https://www.closingtags.com/blog/home-networking https://www.unsungnovelty.org/gallery/layers/ https://thoughts.uncountable.uk/now/ On macOS, we…

Hey!!!!! That is my website! To be fair, the hard part is hard to keep a personal website regularly updated without making people think it's abandoned. I don't have a regular post cadence. So it looks like I don't touch the website at all for months. But I regularly update my posts and other sections event if there isn't any new posts. I also wrote something similar to OP - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024…

Sadely this search engine is now javascript only. So the "small" web...

Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#208

Post by cdrnsf »

krapp wrote: post #104
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The small web can be a lot of things, but IMO it gets too overrun by the ideologically zealous. One does not have to believe in primitive anarchism to enjoy camping, for example. In general it seems any niche idea on the internet is like candle flame to zealous moths.

Ideological zealots are more or less the only people who hate the modern web so much that they want to quarantine themselves within an entirely different and functionally limited protocol or ecosystem. Everyone else is fine discussing camping in Facebook groups and on Reddit and wherever, maybe just using an ad blocker.

I don't think there's anything terribly modern about a collection of large companies trying to present themselves as the entirety of a given thing (the internet in this case).

Re: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

#209

Post by 8organicbits »

est wrote: post #108
8organicbits wrote: post #16

One objection I have to the kagi smallweb approach is the avoidance of infrequently updated sites. Some of my favorite blogs post very rarely; but when they post it's a great read. When I discover a great new blog that hasn't been updated in years I'm excited to add it to my feed reader, because it's a really good signal that when they publish again it will be worth reading.

also kagi exclude non-English sites. Sad for mixed language blogs like mine.

I know kagi doesn't do it, but it is possible to specify language in the feed (xml:lang) such that a feed reader can filter languages the user doesn't understand out of multi-language feeds. One challenge is that lots of bloggers forget to add that tag.
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