Not actually ads as we, the modern netizens of the internet of 2005+20 know them, but fun little sort of buttons or blinkies used to cross-promote other places on the smol web.

I've seen a few of these around. But most recently I stumbled onto navlink ads and it reminded me of the phenomenon. I know there are others out there, I just can't remember where to find them.

Anyway, I like them. It's like using the tools of advertisers to add a little irreverent fun to our indie spaces.

Like you get stuck reaching, because the stretch feels good.

Any language. If there isn't a word, I feel like there should be one.

I'm not going to suggest any because mine would be bad and I don't want to bias your beautiful mind, dear reader.

Description: Meme of wide-eyed innocent Spongebob on left with caption "coffee stains" juxtaposed again muscular and angry Spongebob on the right with the caption "TEA STAINS".

Sorry if memes aren't welcome here. Just have been experiencing this since my partner drinks morning coffee as opposed to my morning tea, but her vessels can basically just be rinsed out. Whereas removing tea stains actually takes some elbow grease.

I'm on an orange pekoe or yorkshire (bagged), followed by ginger-turmeric green tease (loose) kick at the moment.

Hardly needs an introduction, but someone is always experiencing something new on the internet, so if this is you today - congratulations!

You can click many of the images to pop up an archived version of an old Geocities page. Or just scroll and enjoy the soothing theme song (recommend turning sound on (speaker icon in top-right)).

Here's a splainer from the footer of Cameron's World itself:

GeoCities was a web-hosting service that made it possible for people to build their own home pages. During the 90s, users from all over the world created personalized corners of the Internet.

By the time the U.S. service shut down in October 2009, there were over 38 million GeoCities pages. Cameron’s World brings together archived material from thousands and thousands of these sites.

In an age where we interact primarily with branded and marketed web content, Cameron’s World is a tribute to the lost days of unrefined self-expression on the Internet. This project recalls the visual

Or how yesterweb begat web revival begat _smol begat {{INSERT_YOUR_GLORIOUS_AND_FREAKY_HOMEPAGE_HERE}}.

I'm still currently reading this piece, but it's already got enough soy on the bean to be worth sharing. I think it might lean a bit too much into the nostalgia club area of things (which I'll admit is a personal draw), but like I said I'm not done reading it yet. :P

alt to "meat on the bone" I'm still workshopping lol

EDIT: Okay, I kept reading and my initial reticence was unfounded. It's a great taxonomy of the disparate and overlapping personas that describe many of the netizens who feel like a better internet is possible.

Tag urself, I'm nostalgic corpo hater who wants everyone to get along.

 plain

    
030/100 [███░░░░░░░] : The "90s Web"
060/100 [██████░░░░] : The Anti-Capitalists
040/100 [████░░░░░░] : The Socialites
020/100 [██░░░░░░░░] : The Artists
020/100 [██░░░░░░░░] : The Minimalists


  

Gloriously researched and delivered with the characteristic Ed Zitron panache. I can't believe this hasn't been shared here yet!

You should just read it, but I knew I had to share it when I got to this part:

Emphasis mine.

Blurb from the web page:

The Smallweb Subway is an experimental project that seeks to connect communities online using webrings.

[...]

The subway system theme is my attempt at making the internet feel more like a place where you can have neighbors. If a webring looks like a subway line, then it's easier to imagine a friend only a few stops away!

I really like this visual, and being able to see different topics on their own "lines." This feels like such an intuitive design, I hope it gets copied or riffed on elsewhere.

This is pretty well known, but I'm sure there are some people out there who haven't thought of it, because I was one of them until just this year.

You can find links to RSS and Atom feeds below the comic.

I love this RSS feed because it even shows the easter egg text when you hover over the comic in your feed agg.

Example of a button:

The TL;DR is that it just sort of became the standard because of being an early standard, and then because they are kind of a nice size. Something I don't think the article mentions (I'll admit I started skimming around the end) is that when displayed for fun, web folk often like to stack or grid these together, so it makes sense that if you're making a new button that you'd make it the same size, so that it would fit in with all the rest.

I'm looking for something to quickly lookup word definitions. My ideal workflow is this: press button to launch modal, enter word (or grab from clipboard), definition appears, exit modal.

So far, rofi-dictionary seems like the closest thing, but it's only for the (non-free) Oxford dictionary for some odd reason.

Hopefully this is the right community of this! It's the closest I could think up anyway...

Don't let your website be a dead-end. Add a links page to other independent web weavers, and let people continue surfing the tubular series of pipes that make up the small web.

Might be a useful philosophy for those who still find some utility in posting to larger social medias (like Mastodon, etc), but still want to maintain an indie presence that is totally under their control.

EDIT since the forum has shut down, here is a wayback machine link.

If you spend any amount of time perusing the small internets (for there are many), you will come across a link to yesterweb.org. However, you'll quickly discover that it is no longer active (see forum post explaining). It's a bittersweet feeling for anyone coming in late to the game.

But if you continue reading the available corpus, especially the "Summary" you'll find some interesting resources. I particularly enjoyed reading the sections under Significant Errors. To select a couple (just read the bolded parts for the gist):

On community size

It makes no sense to have over a thousand people in one chatroom and simultaneously have high standards for the quality of social connecti

The part that I found heartening to hear was this one:

I am more optimistic than I've been in a long time about the massive potential of the human internet to come roaring back in a way that we haven't seen in a generation

When the two coolest people you know become friends

The post body:

[...] big refactoring project to replace the usage of double types with decimal types. Everything seemed to go well, at least until there was a network hiccup and the application couldn't connect to the database. Let's see if you can figure out what happened:

 undefined

        MessageBox.Show("Please decimal check the connection details. Also check firewall settings (port 1433) and network connectivity.");


  

What a clbuttic mistake.

I don't actually get the joke with clbuttic, though. 🤔

So I've got a new domain and I want to do some fun stuff with it. Specifically, I'm looking for something that's fun to make as well as use.

I've got experience making webservers in p much every major language. My first instinct is to use NextJS just because it's fast and I've used it most recently, but then I also feel the allure of just rawdawging my own HTML/CSS+JS, like my forebears might've done. XML is kind of a pain to handbomb, though; all those closing tags, etc... Though I'm sure there are plugins for that.

Any suggestions? What was the last tool you used that really sparked your joy of creativity? Any really fun frameworks, stacks, editors, etc?

I've recently stopped using tmux in favour of relying fully kitty's built-in windows and tabs, and I'm a fan.

The real killer app for me was the "pass_keys" plugin that allows you to navigate vim and kitty splits all with the same keys. I think there are plugins that allow you to do the same between vim<>tmux<>kitty as well, so it's not like you would need to drop tmux to take advantage of it.

Anyway, so that's been a big shift in my daily workflow. I've been using tmux for well over a decade, and GNU screen before that (I was never able to train myself away from the C-a prefix.

The one thing I miss a lot is being able to quickly detach and re-attach to existing sessions. Especially when doing some work over an ssh connection. But then I can always just shove the terminal into scratch space, or another i3 workspace.

This isn't me trying to sell anyone on ditching tmux. I love tmux, and if it works for y