Web Portal

Official Websites

Official web presences of non-web entities. The purpose of this section is to replace the large subset of web searches that are just the name of some website.

Software - Apps and Plugins

• Firefox
• Firefox Browser Add-ons
• Gimp - docs
• kdenlive - Video editor for Linux
• LeechBlock
• LibreWolf
• OpenShot - Video editor for Linux
• Orion Browser
• Surfraw
• uBlock Origin

Software - Games

• Heroes of Might and Magic
• Zero-K

Software - Operating Systems, Dev Tools, Programming Languages, and Libraries

• Arch Linux
• Benchmark.js
• Bun
• CodeMirror
• Deno
• DuckDB
• Elixir - Docs
• esbuild
• ESLint
• eslint.style
• ExpressJS
• F#
• Flathub
• Git
• GNU make
• Go
• Haskell
• Homebrew
• Husky
• ImageMagick
• JetBrains
• jq
• JSR
• Linux (kernel.org)
• Linux Mint - forums
• Lit
• Lodash
• Marked
• MathJax
• NodeJS
• Node Version Manager
• NPM - docs
• PeerJS
• Playwright
• pnpm
• Preact
• Prettier
• Python
• Ramda
• React
• RSpec
• Ruby
• ShellCheck
• swc
• TC39
• TSTyche
• TypeDoc
• TypeScript - Play
• Underscore.js
• Visual Studio Code
• Vite
• Vitepress
• VSCodium
• WebAssembly
• Yarn v1
• Yarn v3
• Yarn v4
• Zod

Software - Specifications

• Atom Syndication Format
• C++
• ECMAScript a.k.a. JavaScript
• EditorConfig
• GraphQL
• HTML
• JSDoc
• JSON
• jwt.io - JSON Web Tokens
• NPM package.json
• RSS 2.0. Mirror.
• Semantic Versioning
• Semantic Versioning for TypeScript Types
• URL
• Willow Protocol
• XPath

U.S. Government

• Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Federal Aviation Administration
• Internal Revenue Service
• USGS

Local Governments

• City of Palo Alto - Utilities

Academic

• Carnegie Mellon
• Foothill College
• Harvard
• MIT
• North Dakota State University
• Penn State
• Pitt
• Stanford
• Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
• University of Colorado
• University of Michigan
• Willamette
• Palo Alto Unified School District

Businesses

• Framework Laptops
• Greenwaste
• Kagi
• Sunridge Farms
• Monterey Bay Herb Company
• Rancho Gordo
• Fidelity
• Capital One
• Stanford Federal Credit Union
• Rolling Stone Magazine
• Powell's Bookstore
• Venmo

Nonprofits and Charities

• Khan Academy
• Kiva

Other Organizations

• Alan Watts
• Caltrain - schedules
• Deming
• Dewey Decimal System
• KDE
• KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) - public health data
• The Open Data Institute (ODI) - open standards
• Reuters - world news
• WHATWG - The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group
• World Wide Web Consortium

Food

Favorite Recipes (all vegetarian)

• Almond Applesauce Muffins
• Apple Pide
• Ash Reshteh
• Black Bean Chili
• Black Pepper Tofu, "Clay Pot" style
• Brazilian Black Bean Soup
• Butter Icing
• Butternut Squash Soup
• Cardamom Steamed Milk
• Chana Masala
• Cinnamon Rolls
• Dal Makhani
• Ethiopian Lentils
• Farro
• French Lentil Soup
• French Lentil Soup
• Fırında Sebzeli Nohutlu Türlü
• Gallo Pinto
• Ghormeh Sabzi
• Hummus
• Impossible Meatballs
• Japanese Curry with Fried Eggplant
• Lembas (Coimas)
• Mediterranean Lentil Soup
• Methi Dal
• Oatmeal and Coffee
• Peanut Soup
• Perfect Brown Rice Without a Rice Cooker
• Pumpkin Muffins
• Purple Lentil Soup
• Queen of Sheba Chocolate Cake
• Quinoa Mint Salad
• Ribollita
• Soy Sauce Lentil Soup
• Sundubu Jjigae (soft tofu soup)
• Thai Red Curry
• Thai Stir-Fry with Peanut Sauce
• The One Shopping List... TO RULE THEM ALL!
• Tofu Bibimbap
• Tofu in Aromatic Herbs and Spices
• Tortilla Casserole
• Turkish Spinach Pide
• White Rice

Recipes Elsewhere

• Indian Healthy Recipes
• Ozlem's Turkish Table
• Binnur's Turkish Cookbook
• Maangchi - Korean recipes
• Korean Bapsang
• My Korean Kitchen
• Pardon Your French
• Gode Cookery - A webring of medieval cooking sites (h/t Cidoku)
• Cedar Down Farm
• rmf's recipes on baccyflap.com

Merchants

• Sunridge Farms - Organic bulk goods, including grains and beans.
• Monterey Bay Herb Company - Tea, herbs, and spices for very competitive prices.
• Rancho Gordo - Beans!

Art

• Celtic Art by Jen Delyth

Music

See Channel 3 of Culture Machine.

Artists

• In Gowan Ring - Symbolist folk

Discovery

• Every Noise at Once - A catalog of all music on Spotify by algorithmically-inferred genre. An incredible work of data science by Glenn McDonald
• Album of the Year - browse music by release year, going back to the early 1900s. Here's 1920.
• cc-bc - find Creative Commons music on Bandcamp, organized by tag.
• The Lost Media Wiki - Some lost and found, others just lost.
• The Roud Folksong Index - a database of around 25,000 English and Scottish folk songs, compiled by Steve Roud. See also the List of Folk Songs by Roud Number on Wikipedia and the Roud Folk Song Index series on MusicBrainz.
• List of the Child Ballads on Wikipedia - another list of English and Scottish folk songs.
• Musical Traditions - "The Magazine for Traditional Music throughout the world"

Buying / Downloading

• Qobuz - High-quality MP3 downloads. They have an extensive catalog (including every obscure album I've searched for so far).
• Bandcamp - self-publishing for indie artists.

Streaming

• Culture Machine - Channel 3 plays my favorite albums on shuffle
• Deezer

Sheet Music

• Münich DigitiZation Center - search archives of sheet music and manuscripts
• Alexander's Feast - Händel

Lyrics

• Mainly Norfolk - "English Folk and Other Good Music"
• Lyrics Translate - multilingual lyrics
• Universo Cantigas - "Edición Crítica da Poesía Medieval Galego-Portuguesa." In Galician.
• The LiederNet Archive - "the world’s largest reference archive of texts and translations of art songs and choral works."
• Musica International - "The Virtual Choral Library"

Visualizers

• Butterchurn - online music visualizer.

Meditation

Theory

• The Mind Illuminated (book) (subreddit)
• OnThatPath's Video Series
• The Dhammapada and Sutta-Nipâta
• Coping with intrusive thoughts by Ruby Klover — this also happens to be good advice in general.
• Meditation and Going Beyond Mindfulness - A Secular Perspective | Mingyur Rinpoche
• Happiest Man on Earth | Mingyur Rinpoche
• From Panic Attacks to Meditation | Mingyur Rinpoche
• Meditate Better | Swami Sarvapriyananda
• Jnana Yoga: The Path of Knowledge | Swami Sarvapriyananda
• Rational Dharma - no-nonsense explanations of how meditation works.
• Effects of Two Online Positive Psychology and Meditation Programs on Persistent Self-Transcendence - research on enlightenment

Practice

• Meditation timer with water sound

• Culture Machine — for practicing the Middle Way between desire and aversion.

• Sit, Breathe, Wake Up! Guided meditations by Culadasa

  • One - Awareness (40 minutes)
  • Two - Attention (43 minutes)
  • Three - Moving and Stable Attention (46 minutes)
  • Four (21 minutes)
  • Five (35 minutes)
  • Six (59 minutes)
  • Seven (52 minutes)
  • Eight (46 minutes)
  • Nine - Metta (25 minutes)

Reviving Civilization

• A Solarpunk Manifesto. Mirrored at Skyhold.org.
• Skyhold's list of solarpunk and collapsepunk resources
• Diome - Technology for a regenerative civilization. By Andrea Farias.
• Meaningness by David Chapman. A work-in-progress philosophy book.
• Life Itself

Software Development

Literature

• The Art of Unix Programming, by Eric S. Raymond. Compre­hensive, eloquent, and mind-expanding. If you only read one book on software design and development, this should be it. Available as HTML at the above link, but please consider supporting the author by buying the print edition.
• why's (poignant) guide to ruby - If you're going to read more than one book on software, this should be the first one.
• Professor Frisby's Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming
• How Complex Systems Fail - A short treatise by Richard I. Cook, MD. A must-read for any manager in a software organization.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (PDF) by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman.
• John Lions' "Commentary on the Sixth Edition Unix Operating System"
• Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces by Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau.
• The Systems Bible (Systemantics 3rd Ed.) by John Gall
• Martin Kleppmann's Website - research on distributed, local-first, and peer-to-peer systems.
• Beautiful Software - a course in Christopher Alexander's methods and philosophy, for software people. See also the reading list at beautiful.software
• Dreamsongs.com - Richard P. Gabriel's personal site, containing his poetry and essays about Lisp, Christopher Alexander, and software.
• Pivotal Alumni Codex - Resources compiled by former Pivots, including lists of recommended tech videos, Pivotal Labs-like consultancies, developer tools and newsletters. Maintained by Davis W. Frank.
• The C2 Wiki - the original Wiki. Code by Ward Cunningham, text by many contributors.
• Eloquent Javascript - web book by Marijn Haverbeke
• Crafting Interpreters - If you've ever wanted to make your own programming language, this is the book for you. By Robert Nystrom. Available in print and (free!) HTML.
• User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky.
• Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur, 1985.
• On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules - David Parnas, 1972.
• The Emperor's Old Clothes 1981 Turing Award lecture by C.A.R. Hoare.
• The Beautiful Mess - John Cutler's newsletter on product management and software development.
• Manifesto for Agile Software Development - Read this before you hate on "Agile."
• Communications of the ACM, an open-access journal published by the Association for Computing Machinery.
• As We May Think - Vannevar Bush on hypertext. 1945.
• Out of the Tar Pit - Ben Moseley and Peter Marks, 2006.
• Abstraction, Encapsulation, and Information Hiding - Edward V. Berard
• Record Handling — C.A.R. Hoare.

Classic blog posts, talks, &c.

• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - Joel on Software
• Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend - @tef
• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names - Patrick McKenzie
• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time - Noah Sussman
• PHP: a fractal of bad design - Evelyn Woods
• Making Badass Developers (Video) - Kathy Sierra
• Parse, don't validate - Alexis King
• Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud - Kleppmann, Wiggins, van Hardenberg, and McGranaghan
• Boundaries (Video) - Gary Bernhardt
• Functional Core, Imperative Shell (Video) - Gary Bernhardt
• Wat (Video) - Gary Bernhardt
• A Whole New World (Video) - Gary Bernhardt
• The Birth and Death of JavaScript (Video) - Gary Bernhardt
• Agile is Dead (Video) - Dave Thomas
• TDD: Where did it all go wrong? (Video) - Ian Cooper
• Dark Mode Is Wrong (Video) - Jason Barrons
• Experience Report: The WyCash Portfolio Management System - Ward Cunningham, OOPSLA '92
• The pedantic checklist for changing your data model in a web application - Raphael Gaschignard
• The Divio Documentation System - the four types of documentation: tutorials, how-tos, reference, and explanation.
• What's in a Name? Anti-patterns to a Hard Problem - Katrina Owen
• Naming as a Process - Arlo Belshee
• The Twelve-Factor App - How to make web apps that are portable, scalable, and easy to develop and deploy.

Reference

• Refactoring.com - Martin Fowler's site with descriptions of the refactorings from his book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code.
• Wikifunctions - "the free library of [2500+] functions that anyone can edit"
• UnicodePlus.com - search for unicode characters. See also Unicode.org for general information about Unicode.
• Emojipedia - search for emoji
• man7.org - Unix manual pages
• A Complete Guide to Flexbox - on css-tricks.com
• CSS Grid Layout Guide
• Every Layout - how to create fundamental layout primitives with CSS
• caniuse.com - Find out which browsers support a given feature (in JavaScript, CSS, HTML, or SVG).
• MemoryManagement.org - Approaches to garbage collection and more.
• List of Common MIME Types on MDN
• TypeScript Utility Types

Q&A

• Stack Overflow
• Ask Ubuntu
• Superuser

Web Hosting

• Neocities - Free, indie, social web hosting. A spiritual successor to Geocities.
• EU.org - Free subdomain names for individuals and nonprofits.
• surge.sh - Put any folder of HTML files on the web instantly.
• codeberg.org - Free indie git hosting
• Gitea - Self-hosted git web UI, comparable to GitHub
• js.org - Free subdomains for JavaScript projects using GitHub Pages.
• List of MediaWiki hosting providers - Create your own wiki!

UI/UX Design

• Apple Human Interface Guidelines 1980–2013 (archive.org) - and TBH I don't care about any of the later versions.
• Ask Tog - Bruce Tognazzini (early employee at Apple)'s thoughts on UX design.
• Laws of UX - Facts about humans that every designer should keep in mind!
• Contrast Rebellion - A manifesto against low-contrast websites.
• CSS Fonts (cssfontstack.com) - lists web-safe fonts that most computers have installed, so you can craft font-family values that will look good cross-platform.
• Modern Font Stacks - cross-platform font-family values for over a dozen typeface styles.
• David Jonathan Ross Fonts
• Vollkorn Font
• Google Fonts - Free downloadable fonts for your website. You can also hotlink them, but that will let Google surveil your users.
• Recursive - A variable font that blends sans, handwritten, and monospace styles.
• Practical Typography by Matthew Butterick (h/t Ruby)
• Programming Fonts - Online playground for trying out programming fonts. Favorites include Comic Shanns, Mensch, and Monaspace Xenon.
• Mildliner Color Sets

Tools I Currently Use

See also my /uses page.

• Bundlephobia - View the size and composition of NodeJS / JavaScript packages on NPM. Includes comparisons to similar libraries. Useful for keeping your JS bundles small.
• deps.dev - Explore the dependencies of open source software.
• jsdelivr - CDN that distributes code from NPM and GitHub, with neat features like automatic minification.
• Namecheap - Domain registrar
• Markdown - Lightweight markup syntax that bridges the gap between plain text and HTML. Designed by John Gruber.
• @regosen/gapless-5 - gapless and looped audio playback on the web. Essential if you're building a music player.
• tiny-invariant - TypeScript assertion library that does type narrowing.
• Cloudflare - Static/serverless web host and CDN.
• Render.com - Web app hosting
• WCAG Contrast Checker Extension (Firefox) - Tells you about any elements on your webpage that don't have WCAG AA or AAA-compliant contrast. See also the Chrome and Edge versions.
• axe DevTools for Web Accessibility Testing - check any webpage for accessibility problems. Extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and Edge.
• searchpass - A shell script that checks if your password has been exposed in a data breach, without revealing it to anyone. If you're a programmer, you'll appreciate the elegant algorithm. Made by my colleague Larry Hamel.
• uBlock Origin - The ad blocker geeks use. Don't worry, there's nothing particularly geeky about it; it's just an ad blocker that works. Blocks trackers, too! Extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and Edge.
• MarkDownload - View and download the main content of most HTML pages as Markdown. Made by Gordon Pedersen. (h/t Maya via Chris Aldrich)

Tips and Tricks, How Tos

• Exclude commits from "git blame"
  • git config blame.ignoreRevsFile .git-blame-ignore-revs
  • useful if you have formatting commits that touch tons of code but make no functional changes.
• Commit git hooks to repository
  • git config --local core.hooksPath .githooks/
  • Run this in your Makefile (e.g. after installing dependencies) to make it automatic
• How to get RSS URLs from YouTube channels and playlists by Chris Were.
  • It seems you can also paste YouTube channel URLs directly into at least some feed readers (tested with QuiteRSS). E.g. try this one: https://www.youtube.com/@simonroper9218.
• Show or hide HTML elements for screenreaders only using CSS.
• Relative import paths need explicit file extensions in ECMAScript imports
• How to mount an HFS+ (macOS) drive as read-write on Linux (Debian-based)
  • apt install hfsprogs
  • sudo mount -o rw,remount,force /dev/sda2
• How to make an android dumbphone by Viktor Löfgren

Image Repositories

General

• Creative Commons Media Search - Search engine for images with permissive licenses. Also finds audio, video, and 3D models!
• Wikimedia Commons

Photos

• Public Domain Pictures - constantly tries to trick you into clicking on ads for paid stock images, but nevertheless there are public domain pictures on this site.
• Flickr

Classic

• Old Book Illustrations - If you like Wondermark, you'll love this.
• Frugal's Free Image Database - A database of beautiful public domain book plates!
• Public Domain Review - collections of public domain art (and books) (h/t Melon).
• Hokusai Moyo Gafu - a catalog of fabric-dyeing patterns by Katsushika Hokusai.

Computery

• Geocities Backgrounds Collection by Pixel Moondust
• GifCities - Archived gifs from Geocities websites.
• TextureTown - Thousands of textures to use in website backgrounds and 3D worlds.
• Subtle Patterns - website backgrounds on Toptal.com (h/t eev.ee).
• Background Tiles
• Hero Patterns - tiling SVG patterns for your website background.
• Pattern Monster - even more tiling SVG patterns for your website background.
• nnnoise - SVG Noise Generator - create fractal noise or turbulence dynamically with SVG. A very network-efficient replacement for PNG or JPEG textures.
• Grainy Gradient Playground - dithered gradients for a retro (or is it futuristic?) look
• IconsDB
• Heroicons - copy these SVG icons directly into your HTML. Nothing to download. Outline, solid, mini, and micro variants. (h/t JT Archie)
• Cliparts.co - give your website, flyer, or email that ultimate kitschy look.

Web-based Apps and Tools

Sensing

• Time and Date
• Epoch Converter - Converts dates to and from Unix epoch timestamps
• Weather on DuckDuckGo
• Accuweather
• Purple Air - Crowdsourced monitoring of air quality near you!
• Webtrak flight tracker - Tracks aircraft in your area. Pairs great with FAA registry search. Stupid UI thing, though: if you don't want it to ask for / use your location, click "Cancel" at the initial prompt. Then you'll be able to select an airport from a list.

Searching

• FrogFind - Searches the web with DuckDuckGo, but removes all JavaScript and CSS from the linked pages
• Stract - A search engine that lets you use customizable filters called optics (h/t Seirdy)
• Search My Site - A search engine that only returns results from personal sites. (h/t C Jackdaw)
• Wiby
• Marginalia (formerly marginalia.nu)
• Ecosia - Berlin-based web search engine; donates profits to environmental causes.
• Million Short - Filters out the top million (or thousand, or hundred) most popular websites from your search results. Subscription-based. (h/t Cidoku)
• Open Street Map - Alternative to Google Maps. In addition to searching for locations, it can also provide navigation directions.

Calculating

• PVIR Electrical Calculator - calculate power, voltage, current, or resistance.

Creating

• Excalidraw - Create hand-drawn-style SVGs and PNG images
• TinkerCAD - 3D modeling online!
• Flaming Text - Creates logos and typemarks. Not just flaming text, but glowing text, drop shadows, reflections, leopard print... the sky's the limit!
• Dillinger.io - Online Markdown editor
• Firefox theme creator - Essential if you can't stand FF's default low-contrast tabs.
• Favicon.cc - Draw website icons, pixel by pixel.

Verifying

• Dr. Link Check - Test for broken links on your website.
• W3C HTML Validator - Check your HTML for problems that could cause it to display incorrectly in some browsers.

Transforming

• Dither it! - Creates dithered versions of images, as seen on Low Tech Magazine.
• TinyPNG - Reduces image filesizes.
• Squoosh - Another tool to reduce image filesizes.
• JSONPath Online Evaluator - Evaluates JSONPath expressions against data.
• Atmos.Style CSS Color Converter - Converts between hex, RGB, HSL, and LCH. Also names the colors, which is a nice touch.
• HTML to Markdown converter

Publishing and Social

• Mataroa.blog - Minimalist blogging and newsletter platform.
• Bear Blog - Minimalist blogging platform
• Off---line - Clone of Facebook circa 2007
• Blogtrottr - Subscribe to RSS feeds, get blog posts sent to your email

Prototyping

• Regex 101 - Evaluates and debugs regular expressions. Supports many regex dialects including PCRE and JavaScript.

Other Lists of Tools

• Dan's Tools - A list of web tools, most of which are data-converters.

Commerce

• AlternativeTo - Search for things you don't like, find things you don't know about!
• Circular Living

Housekeeping

• Homemade Baking Soda Deodorant
• How to Clean a Kettle with Vinegar

• make your own soap - baccyflap.com

Architecture

• The Christopher Alexander & Center for Environmental Structure Archive
• Patterns at ArchitectureZ
• The Nature of Order - Christopher Alexander's magnum opus

Books

• Project Gutenberg - a repository of over 70,000 free, public domain ebooks
• Wikisource - a free library of texts
• Standard Ebooks - free and public domain ebooks with high-quality typesetting
• Librivox.org - free, public domain audiobooks read by volunteers
• Very Small Rocks - Narrator David Clarke's site, including his audiobook podcast Opera Vox.
• Google Books
• Evertype - Public domain books translated into many languages. A Michael Everson production (I think).
• LibreTexts - Library of free online textbooks.
• Better World Books - Save a tree! Buy used books!
• Ex-Classics - Books that were once favorites, and are now public domain.
• Terebess Asia Online (TAO) - Asian (and other) philosophy works, in many translations.
• Sacred-Texts.com - Religious texts, legends, and myths. Here's The Kalevala.
• Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts collected by D. L. Ashliman. (h/t Cidoku)
• Indie Bound - Find local independent bookstores!
• Bookshop
• Global Grey Ebooks

See also:

• Skyhold's list of Amazon alternatives
• Jess Mahler's list of Amazon alternatives

Specific Titles

• The Systems Bible (Systemantics 3rd Ed.) by John Gall
• The Canterbury Tales in Middle English

Games & Gaming

Heroes of Might and Magic IV

• maps4heroes.com - A huge collection of high-quality player-made maps. See also my own map archive.
• heroesofmightandmagic.com - The official website, with descriptions of every hero, creature, spell, artifact, and building.
• Heroes Community Forums
• Ever wonder how many berserkers it takes to beat a phoenix? My Army Strength Calculator has got you covered.

Other Computer Games

• Zero-K
• Age of Empires (fandom.com) - Unit stats etc.

Catalogs

• ProtonDB - Find out if a game will run on Linux
• SteamDB

52-Card Games

A.K.A. the lost art of amusing yourself without electricity.

• Card Game Rules at Pagat.com - A huge collection of game rules, maintained by John McLeod.

Model Railroads

• Burr Stewart (@muchfunwithtrains) on YouTube
• Layout Design Special Interest Group (LDSIG)
  • Design Primer
• Gateway NMRA of St. Louis
• New Forest Model Railroad Society

Languages and Linguistics

Conlangs

• Ardalambion - Resources on J.R.R. Tolkien's elvish languages, by Helge Kåre Fauskanger.
• Eldamo.org - the ELvish DAta MOdel. Paul Strack's project to collect every word of Elvish in Tolkien's works into one searchable, cross-referenced database.
• A database of conlangs on Conlang.org
• Dedalvs.com - David J. Peterson's site. You might have heard of his language Dothraki.
• The website of Jörg Rhiemeier, creator of the Albic language family.
• The Guild of Linguists Homepage, with info about the D'ni language from the world of Myst and Riven. (h/t Richard Kennaway)

Cornish - Kernewek

• English-Cornish Dictionary - Gerlyver Kernewek
• The Cornish Language Fellowship - Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek
• GoCornish
• Radyo an Gernewegva - Radio of the Cornish Language Community. See also Pellwolok an Gernewegva on YouTube.
• Kernewegva.com - A website about Cornish, in Cornish.

English & Multilingual Dictionaries

• Etymonline - An etymological dictionary of English.
• Wiktionary - A collaborative multilingual dictionary. Extremely comprehensive.
• Merriam-Webster - English dictionary and thesaurus.

Linguistics

• Leipzig Glossing Rules - see also Wikipedia's List of Glossing Abbreviations

Crafting

• Open Stitch Dictionary - crochet, knitting, embroidery, and more!

Knots and Ropework

h/t Low Tech Magazine for all of these.

• Net Knots dot com - descriptions of many knots, with animated instructions
• The International Guild of Knot Tyers
• Knots, Ties, and Splices (1884) by J. Tom Burgess.
• Knots, Splices, and Rope Work: A Practical Treatise (1917) - sorry, broken link.
• The Use of Ropes and Tackle (1922) by H. A. Dana and W. A. Pearl
• The Ashley Book of Knots (1944) by Clifford W. Ashley

History of Technology

• Folklore.org - the history of the Apple Macintosh
• Vintage Apple - the history of the early Macintosh, plus archives of magazines from the 80s and 90s (including Macworld and Byte).
• Every default macOS (and OSX) wallpaper, in glorious 6K resolution courtesy of 512 Pixels.
• Version Museum - Screenshots of old software

Publicly Available Data

• FAA Registry N-Number Search - look up public data on aircraft by n-number (tail number).
• KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) - public health data
• Macrotrends - economic and financial data over time

Archives and Archiving Tools

• Restorativland's Geocities Archive - a resurrection of old websites
• The Internet Archive - A.K.A. the Wayback Machine.
• archive.today - A.K.A. archive.is, archive.ph. Circumvents many paywalls.
• Low Background Steel — Data from before the age of generative AI.
• Crawlee - Web crawling / scraping tool.

General Reference

• Quote Investigator
• arxiv.org
• ResearchGate
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
• English Wikipedia - see also wikipedia.org
• English Wikiquote
• English Wiktionary
• Wikimedia
• Table Flipping Emoticons (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

Information Researchers

Dedicated individuals' comprehensive maps of their chosen domain.

• Every Noise at Once - A catalog of all music on Spotify by algorithmically-inferred genre. An incredible work of data science by Glenn McDonald.
• Eldamo.org - the ELvish DAta MOdel. Paul Strack's project to collect every word of Elvish in Tolkien's works into one searchable, cross-referenced database.
• David Rumsey Map Collection - Historical and rare maps. (h/t Cidoku)
• Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts collected by D. L. Ashliman. (h/t Cidoku)

Web Curators

• varve's burrow - useful programs and resources, plus the author's bookmarks
• Terrible Lizard - free and open access to journal articles; internet privacy; website building resources.
• Public Domain Review - collections of public domain writing and art (h/t Melon).
• Ruby Klover's website, which includes a list of lists curated by the author.
• Brandon's Journal - includes a collection of blogs and websites about internet history, film, comics, pop culture, and Buddhism. There's also a recipe book compiled by the author's great-grandmother.
• Mike Grindle - writing about retro technology and internet culture, plus a links page with a bunch of cool sites.
• The Cidoku Network
• Website Review - a virtual library of deepweb and www sites.
• Melon's Fav Hyperlinks
• garlic.garden by allium house
• candle's website - a collection of tools focused on making tiny, minimalist games
• Dan's Tools - a collection of simple browser-based utilities for web development and data conversion, plus a database of user manuals for physical products.
• Bookmark Beat by Dani Sandoval - Software development and UX design.
• Interestings for Iterators by Davis W. Frank - A collaborative repository of resources for software product development, consulting, and Extreme Programming.
• Krazydad - Sudoku! Mazes! Printable Puzzles!
• Richard Kennaway's List of Constructed Languages
• Mark Rosenfelder has compiled a list of stories and novels that feature languages or linguistics and a list of websites about linguistics.
• Ytoo! - Retro, indie search engines, social networks, memes, and browser-based games.
• Curlie - A collaborative web directory with a search engine (h/t Cidoku)
• Ben Christel - this website. Source code on GitHub.

Inspiration

• Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas by Mark Bernstein. 1998.
• "The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral" by Mike Caulfield. 2015.
• "Curation is Creation" by Cameron Desautels. 2016. If you're decreasing local entropy, you're doing good work.
• "How Blogs Broke the Web" by Amy Hoy. Circa 2017.
• Maggie Appleton on Digital Gardens. 2021.
• "We Can Have a Different Web" by Molly White. 2024. A hopeful look at the web's problems.

My Projects

• Process to Processes - A draft of my upcoming book about software development
• Ben's Guide to Software Development - A newsletter about the book
• Bliki - My personal blog/wiki about software, with 250+ topic-focused pages on everything from abstraction to wholeness.
• The Wayward Web - A webring. A collaborative effort to map the useful, human parts of the web.
• Druthers - Instantly grok your group's priorities with ranked-choice voting. A collaboration with Gavin Morgan.
• Culture Machine - The app I wrote to break my YouTube addiction (it worked). Emotionally-stabilizing "iyashikei" videos played continuously in an unskippable random sequence.
• mdsite - A modern generator for old-school static sites. It turns any tree of Markdown files into a website, complete with auto-generated navigation links. It's also the tool I used to create this webpage!
• Taste - Simple, speedy JavaScript test framework
• yt - Watch YouTube without ads or tracking. Pairs great with LeechBlock.
• hypersearch - Powers the searchbar on this page!
• Bastion - A big directory of links. The predecessor of this page.
• The Cave - Helps you keep track of short-term tasks with deep dependencies.
• Auracle - A word generator for conlangs. Give it some examples of your desired aesthetic, and get more in return.
• Audition - A command-line tool that keeps the prose description of your conlang up to date with its morphology and lexicon.
• The One Grammar to Rule Them All (OGTRTA) - The Lisp of conlangs. A syntax template for people who don't want to think about syntax anymore.
• wwwebring - A fully clientside webring widget for static sites. Powers the Wayward Web.
• LynX - My Linux Mint theme. Re-skins Linux to look and feel like "big cat"-era Mac OSX. Don't ask me how it's pronounced.
• autokeyconf - Rebinds shortcut keys system-wide on Linux.
• "Frost" theme for Docky - An OSX-style dock for Linux.

Webring

Settings

• Automatically focus the search field on page load.

There are external links on this page.