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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

#231

Post by mikestorrent »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #187
unsungNovelty wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They barely mentioned your website (fourth in five urls, mainly talking about indieblog.com and kagi.com/smallweb), so "That is my website!" is confusing and makes it seem like you're autoresponding to a keyword.

Get over yourself

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

#232

Post by mikestorrent »

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…

Now this is what makes me feel the Small Web... creators randomly showing up like this on HN. I feel like I used to see this kind of thing more.

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

#233

Post by mikestorrent »

jibal wrote: post #224
unsungNovelty wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should I auto-respond to a keyword? Just curious seeing it here buddy. Breathe easy.

Yeah, it didn't confuse sensible people who are capable of putting themselves in someone else's shoes. I did a Small Web search at Marginalia and was immediately pointed to sites that claim that I and everyone in my political party are literally the spawn of Satan--I really don't think it's my thing. I helped develop the ARPANET back in 1969-1970 while working for the UCLA Comp Sci dept, got a brief mention in RFC 57…

You sound like someone with stories.... got any I can read?

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

#234

Post by jibal »

mikestorrent wrote: post #233
jibal wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it didn't confuse sensible people who are capable of putting themselves in someone else's shoes. I did a Small Web search at Marginalia and was immediately pointed to sites that claim that I and everyone in my political party are literally the spawn of Satan--I really don't think it's my thing. I helped develop the ARPANET back in 1969-1970 while working for the UCLA Comp Sci dept, got a brief mention in RFC 57…

You sound like someone with stories.... got any I can read?

Nothing offhand that I can share. But take a look at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Sta...

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

#235

Post by SyneRyder »

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…

Not sure if this will be considered helpful, but if you include:

https://www.unsungnovelty.org/index.xml" />

in the HEAD of the pages on your website, it makes autodiscovery of the RSS feed a bit easier - not just for crawlers, but also for people with RSS plugins in their browser. It will make the RSS icon appear in their browser's URL field for easy subscription. Took me a while to find the RSS link at the bottom of your pages!

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

#236

Post by senko »

SyneRyder wrote: post #230
senko wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's two criteria, I agree it's hard to skim: * The blog must have a recent post, no older than 12 months, to meet the recency criteria for inclusion. * Criteria for posts to show on the website: Blog has recent posts ( The latter criteria is for the website / post to appear in Kagi's random Small Web feature, where they display the blog post in an iframe. (So I think only posts from the last week are displayed th…

Thank you. I swear I read that three times and missed the other criteria until you pointed it out and then I found it. :/

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

#237

Post by matheusmoreira »

encom wrote: post #221
thesuitonym wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's big web thinking. A small website doesn't need to be discoverable. It's supposed to be for you, and if someone else stumbles upon it, and finds it useful or entertaining, that's a bonus.

I get the sentiment, but it has to discoverable to some extent, otherwise there's no real point in publishing it on a webserver.

I suppose just having the website online is enough to make it discoverable by search engines.

I have no idea how but people independently discovered my work and submitted it here on HN, reddit and lobsters. For a long time I avoided submitting it myself because I hate advertising with a passion and I absolutely did not want to advertise.

Really made my day when I came here and saw my domain on the front page.

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

#238

Post by krapp »

cdrnsf wrote: post #208
krapp wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I don't think any social media platform has ever actually tried to present themselves as the entirety of the internet.

I don't think anyone actually believes social media platforms comprise the entirety of the internet, either.

But isn't really what people tend to complain about when they complain about the "modern" web. Mostly it's the complexity of websites and the presence of advertising and javascript, the homogeneity of frameworks versus the "quirkiness" of hand-coded HTML, the consolidation of content into platforms (versus, again, hand-coded HTML) and the fact that the web no longer entirely consists of people like themselves. And now AI, of course.

And the fact that every single alt-web is more restrictive than the web, almost universally antithetical to "design" or "creativity" as opposed to pure hypertext, and seems meant to appeal only to the strictly technical mind, bears that out.

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

#239

Post by treesknees »

GuB-42 wrote: post #44

I don't expect many people to agree but I think that the "small web" should reject encryption, which is the opposite direction that Gemini is taking. I don't deny the importance of encryption, it is really what shaped the modern web, allowing for secure payment, private transfer of personal information, etc... See where I am getting at? Removing encryption means that you can't reasonably do financial transactions, ac…

Maintainers of "small web" servers are not being forced to use TLS. If you want to put a plaintext HTTP server on port 80 on the Internet, you can totally do that today with no issues. Sure, modern browsers like Safari and Chrome will show a "Not Secure" message in the address bar, but users are not prevented from getting to the website. Perhaps your site won't be listed on Google, but I think for small web that's acceptable.

That said, there's more to the web than just blogs and recipes. If I want to run a small web forum for enthusiasts of some hobby, I think it'd be irresponsible of me as a webmaster to run that from a microcontroller if it prevents my users from being able to securely authenticate without their password being revealed to prying eyes.

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

#240

Post by squidhunter »

freediver wrote: post #33

Kagi Small Web has about 32K sites and I'd like to think that we have captured most of (english speaking) personal blogs out there (we are adding about 10 per day and a significant effort went into discovering/fidning them). It is kind of sad that the entire size of this small web is only 30k sites these days.

It’s not 30k, it’s well over a million: https://screenshots.nry.me/
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