Exploring the small webs with Marginalia, powRSS, and more
Small blogs, personal experiments, throwbacks to a less computerized past... and more define the small web scene, where various independent websites exist in defiance to the huge platforms that insist on capturing all web users and web traffic to themselves.
But how do you find the small websites?
Today, I decided to explore some small websites, using a few listing of such sites that I've stumbled across. In particular, I'll be trying the following:
- Marginalia Search's Explore feature, that gives you a grid of cool websites to visit.
- Wiby's "surprise me" feature that takes you to a random vintage website.
- powRSS's assortment of personal blogs and other RSS-enabled websites.
- Visit a Random Website's "Visit a random website" button.
- geekring.net's RANDOM feature, that gives you a random geeky website.
For all five of those websites, I'll be opening 12 random links, and rating the random feature by the following scoring rules:
- +2 points for every random website with multiple pages, such as a blog or a store, that has been updated since 2020.
- +1 point for every random webpage that consists of just one or few pages, with no substantial content past a single game or presentation topic.
- 0 points for every link that doesn't work.
Of course, no scoring system is perfect; and as you will see, the one suggested here doesn't actually rate website explorers for how good they are at exploring the web, but just at how good they are at highlighting recent personal websites. So... just chalk that up to me experimenting with rubrics, okay? 😁
Marginalia
Marginalia's Explore page shows a grid of 25 links at once. For parity with the other explorers, I'll be opening the first four links, then refreshing the page for another 4, until I get up to 12.
Here's a list of what I found:
| Website | Comment | Score |
|---|---|---|
| armaina.com | Personal site of an illustrator, drawing comic-style dragon characters and more since at least 2000. | +2 |
| sebas' blog | Personal blog of a C++/Qt/KDE developer with Scuba interests. | +2 |
| Run your own social | Guide to self-hosting your social media. | +1 |
| geekring.net | A webring of self-termed geeks. As it has a Random page feature itself, I'm adding it to list of explorers to check out. | +1 |
| nchrs | Personal wiki/journal of a Linux-using designer/developer with sailing and woodworking experience mixed in. | +2 |
| -- | Dead link. | +0 |
| maetl.net | Redesign-in-progress personal site of a game designer with software architecture interests. | +1.5 |
| The Gravesite | Personal website with cursor particles, of.. a Satanist? | +1.5 |
| Simple Thread | UX Design consulting company specializing in the Energy sector. | +2 |
| makeworld.space | Personal site of a Toronto-based software developer. | +2 |
| The Redwoods Circle | Site of a DID system/plurality offering workshops and resources for others struggling with the same. | +2 |
| Carlos Fenollosa | Spanish personal blog of a AI professor and entrepreneur (with a book titled "The Singularity"). | +2 |
| Total: | 19/24 |
Most of the pages surfaced by Marginalia's Explore feature were rather cool to go through, and even after going through the other website explorers below, Marginalia is still my favorite one. There were a few awesome sites (I even got to bookmark a link out of one!), a few odds ones, some crazy ones. Even a company website.
Wiby
Wiby has a nicely placed "Surprise me" link, which tells you that you asked for it, and sends you off on a merry adventure on some random webpage. I ended up considering the main websites for some of those webpages, since occasionally, it linked to just a subpage somewhere.
| Website | Comment | Score |
|---|---|---|
| crop circle center | Crop circle sightings index, going as back as one can think. | +2 |
| Rotary Powered Webpage | Fan site for rotary cycle engines. With notes on math. | +2 |
| Joe the people follower | Humorous service offering for hiring a personal stalker. | +1 |
| My kites | Personal site with a gallery of kites. | +1 |
| The Dyad way to Enlightenment | Philosophy-exploring group seances? Unsure what exactly that is. | +2 |
| American History in Patriotic Graphics | A gallery of US patriotic images, sounds, music, and more. | +1 |
| ICYouSee | Personal website that has been up since 1994, now just a couple of remaining pages. | +1 |
| Sea Flags | A website exploring all about American sea flags. | +2 |
| Alone in the wilderness | Story of a self-sufficient outdoors-man in a couple of webpages. | +1 |
| LILEKS | Curated pop-culture museum of the internet. Honestly, a site to get lost into. | +2 |
| Química Bachiller JJPN | Spanish site, student resources for Chemistry students by a professor. | +2 |
| Dial up sound | ... a Dial-Up sound? Yeah, that's about it. 😅 | +1 |
| Total: | 16/24 |
There were no dead links here! However, as Wiby is a search engine for the vintage web, it's no wonder that most of the things on here were vintage. And plenty of them were just fan-sites of some sort; things that have nowadays been captured by wikis of various sorts. Still, pleasantly surprised by the few still-updated personal websites it surfaced.
powRSS
powRSS is an RSS feed aggregator which collects daily updates from personal blogs that are manually curated from a list of submissions. As such, it differs from the search engines mentioned so far, in that it is very selective in what it might end up promoting.
I'm almost certain powRSS didn't have the "Random" feature when I looked at it last week. Regardless, it has one now, so I'll be opening 12 links and scoring them as usual. However, since powRSS links to individual webpages/articles, I'll be going back to the website that has the page.
| Website | Comment | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Write Software, Well | Blog of Ruby enthusiast and business-owner from British Columbia. Beautiful design. | +2 |
| daniel.haxx.se | Website of the lead curl maintainer and developer. I'm already following that one, however. 😁 |
+2 |
| Making Matter | Recently-started blog of a maker educator, showcasing the joy of making. | +2 |
| Writeups.org | Collection of long-form write-ups about obscure fictional (comic) characters by many authors since 1999 - often touching on Table-Top RPGs. | +2 |
| Tadaima. | Personal blog with no about page. | +2 |
| The Cozy Cat | Blog about the small web, with a memes and more. | +2 |
| LostFocus | Personal site with blog, link-blog, week-notes, and more. | +2 |
| Ploum.net | Site by a French software-freedom-loving writer, with a few published books. | +2 |
| Kedara | Digital garden and personal wiki by a technology, weather, yoga, and Sanskrit enthusiast. | +2 |
| Pluralistic | Well-known daily link-blog by Cory Doctorow. | +2 |
| Ayudante de Vilinius | Spanish personal blog. | +2 |
| shane finan | Site of an artist combining embedded technology and natural materials. | +2 |
| Total: | 24/24 |
Amusingly, powRSS scores extremely well on the criteria I listed—it is almost entirely links to recently-updated personal blogs, after all. Perhaps if I had given out points for randomness or variety, I could have reduced the point lead by a bit. Compared to the other small web explorers, this one netted more well-known blogs overall, and generally less craziness. So, if you are after discovering niche blogs, powRSS is great! However, it might not be the best option if you are after more obscure parts of the internet.
Visit a Random Website
Visit a Random Website has it's own crawler (looking at the source code), so I was hoping it might find various websites that the other engines missed. However, the interface forces you to wait for long animations between giving you new links, which was rather annoying.
| Website | Comment | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Amersfoort | I.. think this is a listing of Dutch websites related to Amersfoort? | +1 |
| *.33z3.com | Dead link (404) | +0 |
| The Nerdy Nurse | Blog site about nurses and everything nurse-related. GPTZero scores the text as 100% AI-generated. | +2 |
| -- | Dead link (no such host). | +0 |
| Barbara gyöngyei | Hungarian blog/site about making jewelry, dead since 2016 | +1 |
| (withheld) | Romanian hotel website on a booking aggregator. | +1 |
| *.33z3.com | Dead link (404) | +0 |
| *.uptodown.com | Romanian listing of an Android app with APK downloads. Shady? | +1 |
| (withheld) | Polish hotel website on a different booking aggregator. | +1 |
| *.33z3.com | Dead link (404) | +0 |
| *.33z3.com | Dead link (404) | +0 |
| Lovingly Created | Personal blog of a Canadian scrap-booking artist and published author. | +2 |
| Total: | 9/24 |
The idea is great, but it ends up not that amazing in practice. I would imagine that some of those dead links were alive when they were indexed, but even then, Visit a Random Website did not filter any of the chaff out—which is unfortunate. Curiously, both of the best links on here were hosted on blogspot.
geekring
The geekring is a webring for all kinds of geeks. (I should probably toss my website into it once I'm finished with this article.) As such, there is a natural limit to the variety one might expect, as people would have to manually apply to join; however,
| Website | Comment | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Shreyans Devendra Doshi | A platform Reliability Manager's blog; recently-started, not much content up yet. | +2 |
| cadnomori | A medievalist's personal site. | +2 |
| kradeelav | A comic illustrator's personal site and blog | +2 |
| -- | Dead link. | +0 |
| NiboNubo | Personal site of a Sonic/Greek Mythology enthusiast, still lacking content | +1 |
| Ground Control | Unsure what that is; presumably there is more behind the telnet + sign-up prompt, but I didn't explore it. | +1.5 |
| -- | Dead link. (404) | +0 |
| fuzzybabycrow | Neocities webpage by a teen. Still lacking content, but good to see the next generation starting out. | +1 |
| cnaanaviv.com | Website of coder, short story writer, and startup CTO, with a penchant for SMTP. | +2 |
| Robophobia | Website with assorted music tunes by the anonymous webmaster. Amazing chill tunes! ✨ ✨ | +2 |
| acrasis.net | HTTP-only site by a fishing, travelling software enthusiast. | +2 |
| eyvallah | Personal website with a few links by a German postdoc. | +1 |
| Total: | 14.5/24 |
Honestly, there were a lot more single-page or few-page websites on the geekring than I expected. Also, dead links are not ideal on a webring! Yet, the Robophobia site is quite amazing, and was worth going through a bit of chaff to find it, so I'm quite satisfied.
There are many other web rings out there, and it's probably worth exploring more websites through those, but I've already went through 60 websites, so I think I might leave that rabbit hole for another article later on.
In Conclusion
Marginalia Search's explore feature is cool; and there are plenty of odd and amazing sites it can lead you to.
But if you want to explore the small web, there are a lot of other tools, too!
If you want to find high-quality non-crazy personal blogs, powRSS is the way to go.
Meanwhile, Wiby's "surprise me" will take you back in time to the vintage web.
And finally, various webrings, such as geekring.net can take you all around the hyperspace, guiding you to lands unknown.
However, I feel there is more that can be done here. Surely, search engines other than Marginalia also index odd websites? Also, it should be possible to detect obscure personal websites that could use a bit more love and attention. Redirecting random traffic from a haphazard team of web enthusiasts there, similar to e.g. how CodeTriage works for FOSS issues? That'd be a dream 😁
This has been my 9th post of #100DaysToOffload; and is... my first post written while in the process of doing things as opposed to my other posts written about something already done. It's quite refreshing, honestly!
Either way, have you stumbled upon other listings of random websites, small web explorers, or amazing webrings, other than the ones I mentioned?