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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

#91

Post by Terr_ »

skciva wrote: post #89
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 :)

What inspired me to pursue computer related fields was making little badges and forum signatures in Photoshop as a teen. Heartwarming to see this tradition has persisted

I can't be the only one with an ancient collection of artistically-mismatched "under construction" graphics.

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

#92

Post by freediver »

lich_king wrote: post #69
freediver wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to suggest changes to criteria for inclusion. It is mostly the way it is now as the entire project is maintained by one person - me :)

Looking at the criteria again, I can think of at least three things that arbitrarily exclude large swathes of the small web: 1) The requirement that it needs to be a blog. There's plenty of small-web sites of people who obsess over really wonderful and wacky stuff (e.g., https://www.fleacircus.co.uk/History.htm ) but don't qualify here. 2) The requirement that it needs to be updated regularly. Same as above - I get t…

1) It has to have a feed (we dont want to overcrawl) so hence 'blog' - more accurately any site with an RSS/atom feed would do

2) 'Regularly' means posted in the last 2 years to be included

3) Substack has an annoying subcribe popup and ads/popups are against the spirit of what this represents

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

#93

Post by okuntilnow »

mattlondon wrote: post #25
SirFatty wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is exactly the point of Gemini.

Not quite. I think Gemini has deliberately gone for a "text only" philosophy, which I think is very constraining. The early web had a lot going on and allowed for a lot of creative experimentation which really caught the eye and the imagination. Gemini seems designed to only allow long-form text content. You can't even have a table let alone inline images which makes it very limited for even dry scientific research p…

There are images in geminispace, and audio, and (probably) video. It's just not inline. One of constraints of the protocol is that pages cannot load content without your express say-so.

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

#94

Post by Gunax »

It's sad how the snall web became invisible.

I used to use all sorts of small websites in 2005. But by 2015 I used only about 10 large ones.

Like many changes, I cannot pinpoint exactly when this happened. It just occurred to me someday that I do not run into many unusual websites any longer.

It's unfortunate that so much of our behavior is dictated by Google. I dint think it's malicious or even intentional--but at some point they stopped directing traffic to small websites.

And like a highway closeure ripples through small town economies, it was barely noticed by travellers but devestating to recipients. What were once quaint sites became abandoned.

The second force seems to be video. Because video is difficult and expensive to host, we moved away from websites. Travel blogs were replaced with travel vlogs. Tutorials became videos.

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

#95

Post by Borg3 »

oopsiremembered wrote: post #34
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.

I'm with you. Also, sometimes I'm specifically looking for some dusty old site that has long been forgotten about. Maybe I'm trying to find something I remember from ages ago. Or maybe I'm trying to deeply research something. There's a lot more to fixing search than prioritizing recency. In fact, I think recency bias sometimes makes search worse.

http://borg.uu3.net/~borg/?fun/wisdom_of_the_ancients

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

#96

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

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/

my main problem with such links is... how often do you update them? how often do you check those websites to see that they're still active?

I remember going through all the blogs linked on terry tao's blog - out of like 50 there were only 8-ish still alive :(

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

#97

Post by krapp »

jopsen wrote: post #82
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.

> I'd like to think that we have captured most of (english speaking) personal blogs I think that's naive. But maybe thats just because my blog wasn't on the list :)

Neither is mine, But that's fine with me.

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

#98

Post by wibbily »

mattlondon wrote: post #25
SirFatty wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is exactly the point of Gemini.

Not quite. I think Gemini has deliberately gone for a "text only" philosophy, which I think is very constraining. The early web had a lot going on and allowed for a lot of creative experimentation which really caught the eye and the imagination. Gemini seems designed to only allow long-form text content. You can't even have a table let alone inline images which makes it very limited for even dry scientific research p…

It’s tough but one of the tenets of Gemini is that a lone programmer can write their own client in a spirited afternoon/weekend. Markdown is just a little too hard to clear the bar. Already there was much bellyaching on the mailing list about forcing dependence on SSL libraries; suggesting people rely on more libraries would have been a non-starter

Note that the Gemini protocol is just a way of moving bytes around; nothing stops you from sending Markdown if you want (and at least some clients will render it - same with inline images).

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

#99

Post by Ylpertnodi »

Gunax wrote: post #94

It's sad how the snall web became invisible. I used to use all sorts of small websites in 2005. But by 2015 I used only about 10 large ones. Like many changes, I cannot pinpoint exactly when this happened. It just occurred to me someday that I do not run into many unusual websites any longer. It's unfortunate that so much of our behavior is dictated by Google. I dint think it's malicious or even intentional--but at s…

> I dint think it's malicious or even intentional--but at some point they stopped directing traffic to small websites.

Small websites have small dollars?

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

#100

Post by jimbokun »

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…

I think a simpler argument would be that small web is not a good fit if your content is sensitive in the place you are publishing from. It’s meant for public publishing. If you need encryption, use a different distribution mechanism.
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