Comment by varun_ch
5 hours ago
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/
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.
2 replies →
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 :(
I don't use 88x31 buttons but I do maintain an old-fashioned blogroll on my personal website: https://susam.net/roll.html
I follow the same set of websites with my feed reader too. There is an OPML file at the end of that page that I use with my feed reader. I keep the list intentionally small so that I can realistically read every post that appears on these websites on a regular basis.
Although I usually read new posts in my feed reader, I still visit each website on the list at least, roughly, once a month, just to see these personal sites in their full glory. These are blogs I have been following for years, in fact some of them for a couple of decades now! So when a new post appears on one of these websites, I make time to read it. It is one of the joys of browsing the Web that I have cherished ever since I first got online on the information superhighway.
Keeping the list small also makes it easy for me to notice when a website goes defunct. Over all these years a few websites did indeed sadly disappear, which I then removed from my list.