Welcome to my secret place! This is honestly just a collection of web sites I like. In order to qualify for the list, a web site must match the following criteria:
It must work without javascript.
It must have content that I find interesting enough to come back to at least once or enough of it that I'd like to explore it fully.
It has to have the aesthetic of the good days of the internet.
Aside from that, anything goes. Just because of my interest it'll probably lean towards stem-oriented stuff.
Don't know what a web directory is? Click here
Format
Until I have enough links that I feel the need to start breaking them up hierarchically, I'm going to be using this format: The title, which will be a link to the site, then a colon, then a description written by me, then some keywords I put in parentheses. For example:
Example: description & recommended pages (keywords, which, seem, sensible)
They're going to be formatted based on when I added them with the most recent content at the top. I'll also separate batches of content by a line break. I've included cw tags where I consider them appropriate, which are prefixed with 'cw:'.
The List
Dragonfly Cave : A cool Pokemon fan site. I ended up finding it while going through a Gen 1 challenge run. Around since 2002, documents all sorts of real and fake cheats, some game history, it's even got a guestbook. I haven't looked at the affiliate sites, but I suspect there's some neat stuff there too. (games, tech, pokemon)
Konfiskated Teknologies Network: I only
read David Wonn's home page but holy shit is there a lot of cool stuff ther
e. Wonn's cheat page was the highlight that got me in but at a glance there
's tons of cool stuff. (games, tech, science, glitches)
Mining Artifacts: An online museum of mining and miners. Heavier than "allowed" since it consists almost entirely of historical photographs, but it's cool to flip through and has the feeling. (history, photos, heavy)
Hyborian Age D20: An adaptation of the D20 system (D&D 3.5). At a glance it looks pretty good, but I haven't played it. The usual Howardish warnings apply a bit, but atl east they didn't do racial alignment. I especially like how the site provides references as far as like "This bit of content is taken from this Conan story." (tabletop, games, homebrew, tw:racism)
RANDOM ACTION HOUR: Action! Cartoons! Old video games, anime reviews, just somebody's fan site in a fantastic way. Check out Random Action Hour in particular, I found some neat shows I hadn't heard of in there. (anime, games, reviews)
Deadnet: Another OCC-er, Headcrash. A few links, some OCC stuff, some blogging, a few old files. The photo gallery goes over 1MB, but if you click on a photo gallery you ought to know what you're doing. (technology, occ, )
Rats: Rats. Rat stories. Rat facts. Rat designs. (rats, animals)
Homepage Of The Oldternet: A website for old stuff. Not original, but it feels authentic enough even in its voice. A bunch of gaming stuff, a couple of recipes, some doom WADs. Good stuff. (technology, gaming, consoles, windows)
Daggerfall: An Enthusiast's Guide: An old Daggerfall fansite with a lot of cool guides. If you want to play the game now I recommend DFU but almost all of the information is still relevant (gaming)
Ted's Caving Page: The original (or damn near it,) web creepypasta. You'll just have to read it yourself, it's still a fantastic bit of writing (cw:horror.)
Ashido Dot Com: Zarla's website! If you don't know Zarla, go and look her up on youtube. She made some legendary flash animations back in the day. Some cool links, some old school lets plays, awesome stuff all around. There are playthroughs of yaoi games, but all nsfw content is marked as such (games, art, animation, fansite, cw: nsfw.)
Ronald's Electronic Project Site: Found via a Fran Blanche video. Part personal project (a lot with nixie tubes, specifically) part history site. (history, technology, retro, education)
The Museum of Retro Technology: Exactly what it says on the tin. I personally like the trains section but it covers an enormous breadth of history and technology. I noticed something that looks like it might be disguised advertising, but it's hard to tell. (history, technology, retro, education, cw:advertising?)
Boarding School: I can't even begin to explain this. The school is real? I think the person might be fictional though? Maybe? If you go to index.html it has nothing to do with this nor any indication of it, so I think it's all a joke. Just so fucking weird I had to give it a spot.
Doctor DOS: Oh, this is so beautifully old, and it's even still maintained. All sorts of fun DOS stuff; I'm really on a roll finding it lately, huh? Totally feels like somewhere tiny me would've looked at when I was learning how to write batch scripts in the 2000's. (tech, retro, dos)
Better Software: A bunch of Germans who write modern software for DOS. I don't run DOS myself (at the moment, I've had trouble getting networking to work in freedos,) but the software seems useful and interesting. (tech, retro)
gekk: There's a good chance you know this one if you look at video descriptions, if only because it's run by Youtube's Cathode Ray Dude. It consists almost entirely of tech articles plusa couple of music things. (tech, retro, music, networking)
Railroad Signals of the U.S.: An awfully comprehensive guide to railroad signals used in the United States. Also includes some touching memorial pages and some train miscellany. (transport, trains)
Soft Heart Clinic: Just a cute little personal web page. Some nice art, some personal documents, some talking about games the author likes. It's very cozy. (gaming,health,art, cw: mental health)
TA Universe: Like the Gnugs, a shot of pure nostalgia. The biggest fan page for again, the greatest RTS of the 90's and a game which still holds up today. Read artivcles, get the latest mods and patches, read the forums, whatever you want. (tech,gaming,social)
Gnug Home Page: The home page of the Gnugs, a famous Total Annihilation clan. If you missed out on it, TA was by far the greatest RTS of the 90's and this site contains enough tips and tricks to keep you entertained for ages. (tech,gaming)
Peter Gutmann's Home Page: The home page of a professional security researcher at the University of Auckland. Submitted by Chris Waldon. (tech,security)
Coulter Smithing: Old guys try to do fusion. I don't know if it makes for a *correct* read but it's certainly interesting and who doesn't like to try and start a fusion reaction in their garage? Sent in by Andrew Thorp.(science, pseudoscience?)
Pluralistic: Daily Links from Cory Doctorow: I've been a reader of BoingBoing for over 10 years at this point. Cory recently left it and started this blog instead. It's a bit heavy (2MB) but that's mostly images and it seems borderline acceptable to me. (blogs, links)
Microchannel Enthusiasts Page: A fan page dedicated to IBM Microchannel Architecture computers, mainly the PS/2 series (from which we get the name for the connector.) I never would've expected that people were so into a really specific, limited line of IBM PC-ish machines, but there you go Thanks to Vertigo for sending me this link! (computing, history, retro, fansite)
Asheville Paranormal Society: Finally a new entry! Some cool entries on ghost stories and cryptids in the mountains of North Carolina. (cryptids, spooky, folklore, history)
MrP's Castlevania Realm: Perhaps the most comprehensive (obsessive?) fansite on the internet. MrP's been maintaining and expanding this site since the late 90's or early 2000's and it contains every piece of information about any Castlevania game you could possibly want. (history, games, fansite)
Welcome to Netscape!: The original (as far as I can tell) home page for Netscape browsers. It includes a crash course on how to use the web. (tech, retrocomputing, history, directory)
Nathan's Toasty Technology Page: A personal tech webpage. The thing I mostly visit here for is the User Interface gallery. The author has a pretty comprehensive list of GUI screenshots from the invention of GUIs to, well, now. (tech, screenshots, history, cw: ableist slurs)
The Stinkymeat Project: A guy sets out a bunch of raw meat and sees how it decays. He may or may not seriously piss off his neighbor while doing so. ("science", cw: extremely gross, weird)
Low Tech Magazine: Probably the best magazine sort of thing I know of on the web. A huge catalogue of green solutions to modern problems as well as how these problems were solved before we were obsessed with burning oil to solve everything. The website is solar powered, so it goes offline at night (in Spain.) (tech, green, engineering)
Drew Devault's Blog: Blog of the author of Sourcehut, which is probably the only public hosting site that's not garbage. Mostly programming, some tech reviews and community ideas. (tech, blogs, floss)
Sietch Tabor: Thufie's Home Page. Cool person I've seen on the fediverse, author of my preferred software license: the CNPL. A tiny bit on the heavy side (over 1MB,) but still has the aesthetic. Check out the CNPL/CNPL pages and the Create page. (tech, blogs, floss, cool links)
Food Timeline: I found this while looking for some recipes for a 1930's potluck. It doesn't have every food invented, but the list is certainly long enough to be interesting. (food, recipes, history)
Dungeons & Dragons: Some guy’s earthlink site about D&D first edition. Has some useful reference documents. (ttrpgs, gaming)
Mike Kohn's Home Page: More interesting project sites. I met Mike when I was doing some work on an MSP430 microcontroller and he seems cool. (computing, programs, music, embedded)
Ancient Egypt: A website put up by The British Museum in 1999 all about ancient egypt. This website would've been an absolute chonker with all its images in 1999 and its info is out of date, but it's cool. (egypt, ancient history, mythology, cw:death)
American Folklore: A recent find. It looks a bit newer than what I necessarily go for, a bit more early 2000's, but it seems to have a lot of stories. Just due to the nature of the content I'm going to guess there's a fair amount of 'folksy' racism going on. (stories, spooky, horror, folklore, history, cw:racism, cw:comments)
Purple Worm: A full system reference for 2nd edition AD&D. Like other SRDs, this includes gameplay content but not story/adventures. 2nd edition has a lot of really wild concepts like ability score requirements for races/classes, but that’s what makes it interesting. (tabletop, games)
This and That: A site I just discovered today while looking for Victorian recipes. This is classic early web, just a guy posting things he's interested in (stem, cooking, gardening, general)
Science Hobbyist (Bill Beaty): An all time classic. All sorts of cool science explainers and some interesting fringe science stuff. Home of the near-infrared goggle kit, hologram tutorials, and an explainer for why the world's plugs are the way they are, which is how I found the site. (stem, ee, science, arts)
The Gutenberg Project: Free, public domain, high quality ebooks on any topic you like. (books, public domain)
Flak: The blog of an OpenBSD developer. I mostly read it for the software explainers. (software, bsd, unix, blogs)
Honorable mentions
Sites I think are or used to be worth listing, but now fail to meet one or more criteria.
Thedaemon's Space: The small personal site of someone I met on IRC talking about the OCC. A bit short on content for a standalone directory entry, but what's there is neat.
Yiff Systems: It's where nilsding yiffs systems. It's got some nice rockbox themes if you're into that.
Yiffmon: It's Yiffmon. Not much actual content, but it's got the look and the playlist is fun to look through.
Pm - HomePage: Patrick Michaud's home page. Not enough content to deserve a real entry, but look at the pop tart page. (science)
DHTML Lemmings: I'm sure that this wasn't the first flashy DHTML (Dynamic HTML, now called a web app) example out there, but it was the first one I saw. In retrospect it's almost like the beginning of the end. Flash games had a strong hold by this point, but with some clever tricks people could implement whole, interactive games in the browser! Requires JS, naturally. (games, software)
The Internet Archive: Another no brainer. I mostly use it for public domain movies. (movies, books, software, pictures, public domain)
This was home to the internet's first wiki: the Portland Pattern Repository. I'd say that it's still an invaluable source just to read, however in the last few years it’s been rewritten as a single page app which requires JS.
Wishlist
Do you know this site? Sites which sound interesting but someone is unable to remember which I'd like to add to the list.
A horror story site. The site was maintained/written by a guy named Skitters (or something like that,) who worked with a haunted house in Pennsylvania(?). It included quite a few scary stories as well as sections on how to run a haunted house well and how to be scary. I’ve been looking for this site for years and can only assume that it’s offline, but I’m hoping the internet archive may have it and I’m just unable to find it.
About
Have a site you think is interesting which may merit inclusion? Email it to me at t_e-k_k . t_o_n-i_c (a) aol.com . Remove the underscores, hyphens, spaces, and replace that a with an at. Find some questionable stuff on one of the sites I link? Let me know and I’ll either add some CWs to its tags or take it down.