Web Portal

A comprehensive directory of my most-loved and most-used web resources.

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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 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 - 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.

Food

Favorite Recipes

Recipes Elsewhere

Indian Healthy Recipes
Dassana's Veg Recipes - Indian 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

Merchants

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

Music

See Channel 3 of Culture Machine.

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.
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.

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

Deezer

Visualizers

Butterchurn - online music visualizer.

Meditation

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
Meditation and Going Beyond Mindfulness - A Secular Perspective | Mingyur Rinpoche
Happiest Man on Earth | Mingyur Rinpoche
From Panic Attacks to Meditation
Meditate Better | Swami Sarvapriyananda

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.
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.
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.
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."

Reference

Refactoring.com - Martin Fowler's site with descriptions of the refactorings from his book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code.
UnicodePlus.com - search for unicode characters.
man7.org - Unix manual pages
A Complete Guide to Flexbox - on css-tricks.com
json.org
jwt.io - JSON Web Tokens
caniuse.com - Find out which browsers support a given feature (in JavaScript, CSS, HTML, or SVG).
C++ Reference
MemoryManagement.org - Approaches to garbage collection and more.
RSS 2.0 Specification. Also mirrored at Harvard.edu.
Atom Syndication Format Specification
HTML Specification
URL Specification - "The URL Standard defines URLs, domains, IP addresses, the application/x-www-form-urlencoded format, and their API."
GraphQL Specification

Q&A

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.
js.org - Free subdomains for JavaScript projects using GitHub Pages.

UI/UX Design

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.
David Jonathan Ross Fonts
Google Fonts - Free downloadable fonts for your website. You can also hotlink them, but that will let Google surveil your users.
Practical Typography by Matthew Butterick (h/t Ruby)

Tools I Currently Use

Framework Laptops - I use a 13-inch Framework running Linux Mint.
WASD Keyboards
Linux (kernel.org)
Linux Mint - see also the forums
GitHub - Hosts Git repositories. Owned by Microsoft.
GitLab - Hosts Git repositories.
Visual Studio Code (vscode) - Pretty good out of the box, configurable, versatile, and free.
JetBrains - Expensive, but they come with pretty incredible code intelligence and refactoring tools. Lots of stuff you'd have to configure yourself or use plugins for in other editors "just works" in JetBrains.
NPM - Hosts NodeJS packages. Owned by Microsoft. See also the NPM documentation.
Rubygems - Hosts Ruby gems.
jsdelivr - CDN that distributes code from NPM and GitHub, with neat features like automatic minification.
Namecheap - Domain registrar
Vite - Fast, easy-to-use dev server for single-page apps. Built-in hot-reloading and TypeScript compilation, among other features.
Yarn - package manager for NodeJS. Replaces npm. For v1 docs, see classic.yarnpkg.com.
Bun - blazing fast, but somewhat crash-prone replacement for node and npm that also implements some web APIs (but no DOM). I use Bun to run mdsite and Taste tests.
ESLint - I am experimenting with eslint.style as a JavaScript/TypeScript formatter, replacing Prettier. See also Anthony Fu's post "Why I don't use Prettier".
Prettier - because it's still the easiest formatter to set up, and I agree with 95% of its choices.
TypeScript - Statically-typed superset of JavaScript. Owned by Microsoft.
Husky - Git hooks framework.
Markdown - Lightweight markup syntax that bridges the gap between plain text and HTML. Designed by John Gruber.
Preact - Lightweight reactive UI library. Keeps the DOM up to date when your application state changes.
ExpressJS - Popular REST server framework for NodeJS.
Marked - Markdown-to-HTML converter for NodeJS
CodeMirror - Code editor by Marijn Haverbeke
@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
Gimp - the GNU Image Manipulation Program. An open source image editor similar to Photoshop. See also the Gimp documentation
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.

Tools I Have Used

Flow - A type system for JavaScript, similar to TypeScript. Flow is, IMO, the superior typechecker in several respects, including correctness and performance, but unfortunately no one uses it.

Tools I Might Use Someday

Taskwarrior - Manages todo lists from the command line.
The Old Reader - An RSS feed reader modeled after the now-defunct Google Reader.
Deno - see also the documentation
pnpm - Replaces npm.
Neutralino - Build lightweight cross-platform desktop apps with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
daisyUI
SQLite
zed - An editor designed for remote pair programming.
Fly.io - web server hosting
Gource - visualize Git repo history as an animated graph
Milkdown - a framework for WYSIWYG/markdown combo editors. Write markdown that converts to rich text as you type. Made by Mirone.
MDX - A cross between Markdown and JSX. Lets you add React components to Markdown documents and render those documents in a React app.
day.js - a JavaScript library for date/time calculations.
date-fns - another JavaScript library for date/time calculations.

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.
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.

Image Repositories

GifCities - Archived gifs from Geocities websites.
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)
Wikimedia Commons
Flickr
Cliparts.co - give your website, flyer, or email that ultimate kitschy look.
Old Book Illustrations - If you like Wondermark, you'll love this.
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.

Web-based Tools

Sensing

Time and Date
Epoch Converter - Converts dates to and from Unix epoch timestamps
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.

Calculating

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

Creating

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

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

TinyPNG - Reduces 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

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

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

Architecture

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

Books

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

Specific Titles

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 Creature Ratings page has got you covered.

Other Computer Games

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

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.

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.
The Conlang.org Database
Dedalvs.com - David J. Peterson's site. You might have heard of his language Dothraki.

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

History of Technology

Folklore.org - the history of the Apple Macintosh

Publicly Available Data

FAA Registry N-Number Search - look up public data on aircraft by n-number (tail number).
Macrotrends - economic and financial data over time

Archives and Archiving Tools

The Internet Archive - A.K.A. the Wayback Machine.
archive.today - A.K.A. archive.is, archive.ph. Circumvents many paywalls.

Universities

General Reference

Search Tools

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

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.
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.
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.
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.

Webring

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