Artifacts of the Small Web

Islands 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.

Minimator 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.

Memories of being online

If 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.

I 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.

I’ve built this little backyard to my website, because every website should have a garden, a backyard, a basement, or any other wild space. Treated with lovely care it grows various experiments in a natural, playful, hypertext way.

What the Web has done to documents it is doing to just about every institution it touches. The Web isn't primarily about replacing atoms with bits so that we can, for example, shop on line or make our supply chains more efficient. The Web isn't even simply empowering groups, such as consumers, that have traditionally had the short end of the stick. Rather, the Web is changing our understanding of what puts things together in the first place

Little 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.”

A website is a poem that is already in everyone's pocket, a house built from photos of other houses, a book where every chapter is another book where every chapter is another book. In this class we will be studying the poetics of the web: the raw material of HTML, the systemic visuals of CSS, the endless interactive possibilities of Javascript and the browsers, servers, protocols, and infrastructure that holds it all together. Each week we will make websites. We will make small websites that only convey a single, tiny idea. We will make large websites whose clutter and convoluted interlocking pages feel like exploring an abandoned mansion. We will make websites that speak, websites with secrets, and websites that tell one perfectly executed joke. And as we build the web we will also learn its history from the early geocities days to the ways we tried to be fully present over the pandemic, and all the wonderful and useless websites artists have made in between.

These are websites which aren't available 24/7...they have some specific schedule directly related to their concept.

...Some of these websites are always available, but their presentation changes depending on time in a specific place.

laurel schwulst is an artist, designer, writer, educator, and technologist based in nyc. she is recognized for her experiential projects-as-worlds, her expanded writing practice, her creative direction leadership, her websites, her innovative learning materials and educational environments, and her ongoing collaborations. her writing (published in venues including the new york times, the creative independent, and art in america) has taken the form of essays, perfume reviews, and interviews with other artists. for over a decade, she has taught award-winning design classes and workshops (at universities including yale and princeton), and has presented internationally at cultural, academic, and internet-native institutions (at venues including bbc radio 4, risd, university of seoul, google, and wikipedia). laurel currently lives in new york city, teaches design at princeton, serves as director of the gift shop at are.na (a platform for networked curation), and is working towards a “pbs of the internet.”

The most minimal sites on the web, curated in one place.

No overly animated content.
No scroll jacking.
No excessive storytelling.

Less, but better.

telescopictext.org is an experimental tool for creating expanding texts. It is based on telescopictext.com.

An archive of artist' homes and studios around the world.

There are many ways of learning and traveling. We found that we navigated towards destinations where we gain insight into our own time by transcending ourselves and experiencing other people’s lives in different times in history.

Whether it’s Georgia O’Keffee’s home and studio in the desert in New Mexico,
the Eames’s modernistic home in the hilly sides of LA,
or Philip Johnson’s the Glasshouse in Connecticut,
we learn from the places we visit.

We are fascinated by their life work, the aesthetics and details of their places, the philosophy they lived by and the conversations we imagined they had with like-minded artists and friends.

Tune Into Forests From Around The World. Escape, Relax & Preserve.

Imagine the internet like a huge neighborhood. There's a lot of folks around, but we rarely bump into each other, right? Kagi's all about humanizing the web and we want to help surface the people behind the posts and stories that zip by. This less known corner of the web is also known as the "small web".

I’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.

I'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.

The "cheap" web is a solarpunk philosophy of web design.

• Cheap to maintain: Most webpages should work indefinitely without falling over.
• Cheap to leave: Opting-out of the web should be painless.
• Cheap to access: Most websites should be compatible with screenreaders, etc.
• Cheap to participate: Interacting with the web should be possible on a Wii.
• Cheap to explore: Exploring the web should be pleasant on 1W of power.
• Cheap to contribute: Making/hosting websites should be easier than scrapbooking.

Dead simple, drag & drop websites for anything.

Websites don’t have to be so cookie cutter. Try it out — tap Edit in the bottom right, then tap anything on this page.

I 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.

We 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!

You probably build websites and think your shit is special. You think your 13 megabyte parallax-ative home page is going to get you some fucking Awwward banner you can glue to the top corner of your site. You think your 40-pound jQuery file and 83 polyfills give IE7 a boner because it finally has box-shadow. Wrong, motherfucker.

Stripe 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.

for my girlfriend, on the occasion of her thirty-third birthday.

Gardening, but with emojis and less time.

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?

Maybe 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?

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!

I 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."

A worst-practice UI experiment.

With 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.

I never wanted to be a designer, always a writer.

So 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!

The Project 100 Vending Machines From Japan is an explorative photo series documenting my first visit to Japan in mid-2024. It showcases the unique vending machines I found throughout my trip, featuring locations such as Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Uji.

these are all websites i think are lightweight in the feeling-based way — they have a strong concept, are relatively simple, and help me see the world in a new way ... many of them also happen to be literally lightweight, which might flow naturally from their concepts.

Search for a TV Series to see a heatmap of average IMDb ratings for each episode.

Special Fish is a community site for publishing poems, journals, logs, and lists.

"Did you make it?" Is a poem writen by Sam Mason de Caires

It is contained within this website which is synchronised to the tides of the coast line where Sam lives.

As the tide rises it covers the beaches and also the lines of this poem, as the tide recedes it reveals more, until at low tide it will reveal the entire poem.

The accompanying music is meant to be listened to while visiting the site and reading the poem and is made from local recordings and samples made by Sam and also gifted by friends.

LoveFrom,
is a creative
collective.

This project is an abridged, hyper-textual, and copyleft manifestation of the 1977 architecture classic A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander.

A curated list of sites with an extra bit of fun.

Japan 2024
Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka

a comic about growing up online

I’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?

I’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.

Creative code golfing.

JAMES TAYLOR-FOSTER

EDITOR & WRITER of essays & reviews
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGNER,
MAKER of exhibitions

How many HTML elements can you remember?

an old-school blogroll, now with banners 😎

The goal of these pages is not to be a model of concision, maximizing entertainment value per word, or to preach to a choir by elegantly repeating a conclusion. Rather, I am attempting to explain things to my future self, who is intelligent and interested, but has forgotten. What I am doing is explaining why I decided what I did to myself and noting down everything I found interesting about it for future reference. I hope my other readers, whomever they may be, might find the topic as interesting as I found it, and the essay useful or at least entertaining–but the intended audience is my future self.

Create a text document, share the link and edit it with friends.

A recreation of the original 1821 color guidebook with new cross references, photographic examples, and posters designed by Nicholas Rougeux.

While commercial websites display more and more agressive messages, target and track their users, the indie web respects the individuals, their intelligence and their privacy; it’s an open forum for thoughts and debate. While purely commercial websites turn into information and entertainment magazines, while tycoons of media, telecom, computing and military agencies fight for the control of the Internet, the indie web offers a free vision of the world, bypasses the economic censorship of news, its confusion with advertising and infommercial, its reduction to a dazing and manipulating entertainment.

This piece is a contemplative exploration of color and perception, inviting you to immerse yourself in the subtle art of visual interaction between colors. Over time, the generated shapes gradually coalesce into a monolithic form. Once complete, the composition gives way to a new visual experience, offering a continuous journey through evolving palettes.

WELCOME
TO
THE
WORLD
WIDE
WEB,
AN
INTERACTIVE
MEDIUM
IN
WHICH
SCREEN
RESOLUTION
STATISTICS
ARE
TRIVIAL,
BROWSER
VIEWPORTS
ARE
VARIABLE,
AND
SCROLLING
BEHAVIOUR
IS
A
STANDARD.

I made a new game with greg technology. It’s called Talk Paper Scissors. It lets you play rock paper scissors with strangers by calling a phone number.

It’s an attempt to make an audio-only stranger video. Here’s how it works:

1. you call a phone number
2. you’re asked to say rock, paper, or scissors
3. you aren’t allowed to say anything else
4. you hear a recording of what the stranger said and are told whether you won or lost

To play call 1-(515)-762-5762 (that’s 1-515-ROCK-ROC).

A couple of days ago I stumbled on the Slash Pages website which lists common slash pages found on websites, usually personal ones. Slash pages are root-level pages focused on a specific topic, for example /about or /contact. I have a few of those on this site so I decided to take a moment to list them all here.

/about
/contact
/follow
/now
/supporters
/colophon
/uses
/blogroll
/guestbook

While physical intimacy between humans is almost extinct, we understand you maintain a biological and psychological need to give erotic pleasure.

We have created It is as if you were making love to provide a usable and efficient experience of pleasuring a partner without the distress and dissatisfactions of a physical body to navigate.

(we)bsite is a living collection of internet dreams from people like you, inhabitants of the internet. It aims to create space to hold, show, and uplift everyday visions and hopes for the internet.

Slash pages are common pages you can add to your website, usually with a standard, root-level slug like /now, /about, or /uses. They tend to describe the individual behind the site and are distinguishing characteristics of the IndieWeb.

I think the right path forward is to stop assuming there will be some amazing site to rule them all, where you’ll suddenly achieve virality and become rich and an infinitely large following. The future is returning to an artisanal web, where you cultivate your niches and small communities, where maybe you don’t become a millionaire and a star, but you do feel a sense of belonging, and maybe make enough to get by.

Sunday postcards with links to the quiet, odd, and poetic web.

Use 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.

if you search for “lightweight websites” on the web, you will come across very utilitarian definitions of what lightweight sites are — small or even smaller in file size. this is great — as i am all for a web that is quickly loading, good for the environment, and accessible — but this is a very literal definition.

for this workshop, i want to extend the definition of lightweightness to a more literary or feeling-based one. i think lightweightness is about seeing the world in a new way.

Internet gardening evokes thoughts of the other side of the web: where you are on your own land, cultivating the thoughts on your mind. Letting ideas grow.

I like this metaphor [from James G] for personal websites and not just “digital gardens” because there are so many styles* and approaches to gardening, and everyone’s working with different constraints of weather and water and soil. I feel like we’ve gone through the formal garden equivalent of personal websites in the form of lookalike portfolio websites, and now we’re ready for the more naturalistic Piet Oudalf style (my aesthetic preference 😉).

I’m working on a personal site refresh, oh so slowly. Part of the process has been considering what slash pages I have or want.

Robb Knight has a great list of ideas over at slashpages.net.

But there’s one I’ve had for a decade, that I think others might consider adding: /why.

It’s an opportunity to say what you care about, what direction you’re heading, and how you hope to exist in the world. A minifesto on the purpose of your site, or your work.

I’ve been running a blog for a while — some of the oldest posts I’ve found (which are no longer reflected on this site due to their low quality) were from 2015. In this time, I’ve been on the lookout for ways to improve the site, and I’ve seen quite a few little things that are nice to use, but relatively easy to implement. They don’t really make or break a website; the absence of such features might be noticed, but will not cause any disruption for the reader. On the other hand, their presence serves as a QoL enhancement. I find these to be analogous to Hillel Wayne’s notion of “microfeatures”.

• Sidenotes
• Tables of Contents
• Showing Page Progress
• Easily Linkable Headings
• Grouping Series of Posts
• Dialogues
• Code Blocks with Origin
• Code Blocks with Clickable Links
• Markers for External Links
• Different Markers for Different Destinations
• Link Previews
• RSS Feeds
• Links to Other Sites

a website with a thermostat
a website that floats in through the window
a website that is often partially shaded
a website that isn't sorry
a website with a courtyard

To have a personal website is, presently, an act of rebellion. It is a statement. You are saying: I want to define my experience on the web. I'll let you in on an open secret: Big tech companies aren't the only ones who get to decide how we share ideas on the web. The web is yours. You can put up a website where you share whatever it is that you want to share with others.

This 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.

This type of website is a often referred to as a "memex", a kind of archive and mirror of everything that one has done, that one has learnt. It's a living document that outlines where one has been, and a tool that advises where one could go.

This site helps you understand which tag you can include in another using the WHATWG HTML specification.