Pablo Murad

Come get lost in weirdnet

· 3 min read · #smallweb · #indieweb · #personal-web · #web · #projects · #retro

weirdnet.org is a hand-made map of the small, weird, personal web: 45,589 links in 314 categories, a 1996 look, a Random button, a link dump with RSS, old recipes, crazy letters and a guide to starting your own site. Come get lost.

Contents

If you miss the web where you'd click a link on someone's homepage, land on a stranger's shrine to a band you've never heard of, and somehow end up two hours later reading about ham radio antennas, I made a place for you.

It's called weirdnet.org, and it's a hand-made map of the small, weird, personal web. Right now it holds 45,589 links, sorted into 314 categories and 899 tags. There's no feed deciding what you see, no ranking, no ads. Just a big pile of human websites and a lot of ways to fall into them.

The weirdnet.org home page on a white background. At the top, the word weirdnet in a red italic script with a yellow glow, then a row of gray buttons: Directory, Link Dump, What's New, Search, Random, Info. Under them, two lines of small blue links (Crazy letters, Letters of Hart, Weird recipes, Photos, Uncurated, Suggest a site, Start your own site, Notices, Stats, Manifesto), the line "A hand-made map of the small, weird, personal web. 45,000+ links", a search box and a green digital counter reading 045589. Below, a two-column list of categories in blue Times New Roman with their counts, like Personal sites (6,577), Archives (4,819), Retro web (910), Amateur radio (682) and Zines (507).

Yes, it looks like 1996. That's on purpose. Times New Roman, blue and purple links, gray buttons and a green hit counter. The pages are plain HTML with one tiny stylesheet for the whole site, and almost no JavaScript. It loads fast on a bad connection and it'll look the same in ten years.

Where to start #

Press Random #

It's the easiest way in. The Random button on the home page sends you to one site from the collection, no questions asked. It might be a tiny Neocities page, a forgotten archive or somebody's blog about woodworking. Press it again and you're somewhere else entirely. It's channel surfing for websites.

The Directory #

directory.weirdnet.org is the organized side. Sites are filed by category, and the categories go from the obvious to the delightfully specific:

  • Personal sites (6,577), the heart of the whole thing
  • Archives (4,819), for when you want to dig
  • Retro web (910) and Retro computing (302)
  • 512kb club (894), sites that weigh less than half a megabyte
  • Amateur radio (682), a whole world of call signs and QSL cards
  • Zines (507), Net art (599) and Subcultures (568)
  • Paranormal (328), because of course

Every site has a short description, so you know a little about where you're going before you click. And there's a list of all 314 categories plus a tag browser, if you want to go down a very specific hole.

The Directory page of weirdnet, with the subtitle "...it's a wild, wild web." Three columns of bold blue category links with counts: Personal sites, Archives, Programming, Visual arts, Web design, Games, Literature, Music scenes, Retro web, 512kb club, Amateur radio, Music, Net art, Subcultures, Zines, Crafts, Anime manga, Wildlife, Religion, Astronomy, Photography, Small web, Software, Paranormal, History, Retro computing, Philosophy, Movies tv, Film animation and Hobbies. Below, links to all 314 categories and to browse by tag, and a "Newest sites" list starting with Susan Shu Chang, marked with a small animated NEW badge.

links.weirdnet.org is the messier sibling, with the motto "...i found this and dropped it here." Everything shows up in the order it arrived, newest first, with tags, an archive by month and a search box. On any given page you might find an old GeoCities page next to a 1980 computer animation, a zine scan on the Internet Archive and somebody's essay on Hermetic symbols.

The Link Dump has RSS and Atom feeds, so you can drop it into your feed reader and get a little stream of the weird web every day.

The odd little rooms #

Besides the directory, weirdnet has a few corners that have nothing to do with links.

Crazy letters. Over a hundred absurd letters, with titles like "Ghost included in the price", "Buying a flea", "Small talk with a frog-man" and "The great stoat revolution".

Letters of Hart. A small archive of 36 texts by Michael S. Hart, who started Project Gutenberg in 1971 by typing the Declaration of Independence into a university computer and sharing it on the network. The texts are about books, reading and free access to both.

Weird recipes. Forty old recipes, the kind with spelling from another century. Stewed Pompions, Bird's Nest Pudding, Raspberry Shrub, Potatoe Pasty and, yes, Parmesan Ice Cream.

Photos. A handful of random trips from before 2008.

Stats. A page that looks like an old BBS sysop screen, green on black, reporting the numbers of the whole place, including the line "ALGORITHMS: 0 detected".

The System Stats page of weirdnet, styled like an old BBS screen: green monospaced text on black inside a border of colons. The header reads "WEIRDNET SYSTEM STATISTICS, human-curated, zero algorithm", followed by lines like NODE weirdnet.org, SYSOP p. murad, UPTIME 10901 days (since 1997, allegedly), ALGORITHMS 0 detected, LINKS INDEXED 45589, IN DIRECTORY 33459, CATEGORIES 314, TAGS 899, LETTERS 102, RECIPES 40, HART TEXTS 36, and the start of a bar chart of top categories.

If you want your own corner #

Browsing a few hundred personal sites has a side effect: you start wanting one. The Start your own site page is a friendly guide for exactly that moment. It walks through getting a domain, picking a place to publish (Neocities, Nekoweb, Bear Blog, Mataroa, prose.sh and others), turning on a feed and saying who you are with an h-card. No jargon wall, and you can stop whenever you have enough.

And if you already have a weird, personal, hand-made site, or you know one that belongs in the collection, there's a Suggest a site page. Personal sites, fan shrines, odd archives, webrings and small tools made with love are all good fits.

Why it exists #

There's a manifesto on the site, and one line from it sums up the whole project better than I can here: "The centralized web is a mall with velvet ropes. The decentralized web is a city: messy, alive, uneven, full of tiny lights."

weirdnet is my attempt at a map of that city. It's free, it has no account to create and nothing to install, and it's open to anyone with a browser and a free afternoon.

So go on. Open weirdnet.org, press Random, and tell me where you landed.