# Interesting Websites - Page: https://shared.btbytes.com/p/websites - Date: 2020-03-05 - Tags: web Trying to collect websites that are intersting, free-standing, with a bit (or a lot) of personality. Preference given to "hand-made" websites. And to do so, [all you may need is HTML](https://fabiensanglard.net/html/index.html). The art of building "personal" websites is a thing of the 90s, it appears.. (See also the idea of [IndieWeb](https://indieweb.org/)). Why have a personal website? - [A Website To End All Websites \| Henry From Online](https://henry.codes/writing/a-website-to-destroy-all-websites/) - [95 reasons for having your own website](https://bellkiosk.website/blog/reasons-to-website.html) ---- - [Joe Roberts](http://www.rocketroberts.com/joe.htm) - [For What It's Worth](http://web.archive.org/web/20140503044402/http://www.dillonmarsh.com/forwhatitsworth.html) [Offline] - [George Hart](http://www.georgehart.com/index.html) - [Peter Norvig](http://norvig.com/) -- needs no introduction for anyone familiar with computer science. - [Dubno.com](http://dubno.com/) -- a family website. - [Mark Irons’ Home Page](http://www.rdrop.com/~half/index.html) -- a huge inspiration for this page. I made a note of his [passing here](https://www.btbytes.com/log/2014.html#mli). - [Zuckershack](http://www.zuckershack.org/) -- friend of MLI mentioned above. - [Boston](http://boston.conmawen.org/about/technical.html) - [kirk.is|archive by month](https://kirk.is/arch/) - [HomePage for Brian Harvey (bh at cs.Berkeley.EDU)](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/index.html) author of [Simply Scheme: Introducing Computer Science](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/ss-toc2.html) - - creator of SICP distilled. also see his "101 Goals in 1001 days" project. - [Patterns — Gordon Brander](http://web.archive.org/web/20180830214654/http://gordonbrander.com/pattern/) - [Thorsten Ball](https://thorstenball.com/) -- good frontpage for developer - [Laurence Tratt](http://tratt.net/laurie/) -- good frontpage for developer - [The Murgia Hack System](http://web.archive.org/web/20180831051053/http://mhsys.org/notes/index.html) -- good use of simple, multiple column layout. - [Jason Goldstein | Developer](https://whatisjasongoldstein.com/) uses Matthew Butterick's [Equity Text](https://practicaltypography.com/equity.html) typeface for body. nice. - [Jordan Vincent | UX Designer & Software Engineer](http://jordan-vincent.com/) - [kevinlynagh.com](https://kevinlynagh.com/notes/pricing-niche-products/) -- very readable, text first website design. - [Gwern.net](https://www.gwern.net/) -- in depth articles. in his own words -- "psychology, statistics, and technology; I am best known for my writings on the darknet markets & Bitcoin, blinded self-experiments & Quantified Self analyses, dual n-back & spaced repetition ... ". Built using [Hakyll](https://www.gwern.net/About#colophon). - [Dan Luu](https://danluu.com/) in depth articles on hardware and software engineering. (eg: [Do programmers need math?](https://danluu.com/math-bias/), [HN: the good parts](https://danluu.com/hn-comments/)) - [byuu | byuu.net](http://web.archive.org/web/20130824202212/http://byuu.net/) -- game emulator resources. - [~hl](https://www.devever.net/~hl/) -- “an online dustbin where you leave your collected written thoughts” — someone describing this website. Programming and stuff. Arrived there via [XML is almost always misused](https://www.devever.net/~hl/xml). * [Jeff Kaufman](https://www.jefftk.com/index) * [Fabulous Text Only Websites, 2018 Edition](https://rickcarlino.com/2018/07/11/fabulous-text-only-websites-2018-edition-html.html) * [Peter Schaffter](https://www.schaffter.ca/about-me.html); the creator of [mom groff macros](https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-01.html). * [Evan Jones - Software Engineer | Computer Scientist](https://www.evanjones.ca/) * [Minid.net – Diego Martin Lafuente's personal website & blog](http://minid.net/) * [Cal Paterson](http://calpaterson.com/index.html), programming essays. See [How a SQL database works](http://calpaterson.com/how-a-sql-database-works.html). * [Kragen Javier Sitaker’s home page](http://canonical.org/~kragen/) -- programmer, long essay writer. Worked with him for short duration (few emails?) in 2008, when I was working for [Aaron Swartz](http://www.aaronsw.com/). * [John Salvatier](http://johnsalvatier.org/) ai and machine learning researcher. See: [Reality has a surprising amount of detail](http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail) * [Simplifier](https://simplifier.neocities.org/index.html) -- diy website. plenty of projects on the homepage. hosted on neocities. really cool. This is one of the best examples of a "High Signal/ Low Ceremony" websites you can find. Even the webpages appear to be written "by hand". Amazing. The fact that the creator did not even put a name on it makes it even more impressive. * [Piero Scaruffi's knowledge base](https://www.scaruffi.com/); over 6000 colorful pages. whew. * [JMNCO Home Page](http://flounder.com/) (Flounder) * [Org-mode, Emacs, and Getting Things Done](http://web.archive.org/web/20070709001353/http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/) hand built site of various stuff. search for his root of the website in google to see more pages. the root of his website shows a default page. * [Tom Murphy 7's Invincible Web Page](http://tom7.org/) -- CS person. Interesting '90s looking design. programming languages, games, art stuff. * [Codex 99](http://codex99.com/archive.html) -- about art, design and history * [Words and buttons online](https://wordsandbuttons.online/index.html) — a growing collection of interactive tutorials, demos, and quizzes about maths, algorithms, and programming. * [Graham Duncan](https://grahamduncan.blog/about/) -- via [david_perell](https://x.com/david_perell/status/1581360451048218624); see also [Miikka Koskinen](https://miikka.me/), which has long been an inspiration for this site. I am yet to incorporate the "portfolio" aspects of either site. * [Dmitry.GR](http://dmitry.gr/?) -- electronics projects. - [Beyond the Frame](https://schmud.de/) -- development blog, [clojure](https://shared.btbytes.com/p/clojure) etc. uses Tufte CSS, pleasing design. - [A Universe of Sorts](http://bollu.github.io/) -- math, chapellang, and [clojure](https://shared.btbytes.com/p/clojure) blog. - [Developer Roadmaps - roadmap.sh](https://roadmap.sh/) - [Felix' Blog](http://web.archive.org/web/20230928031755/https://felix-knorr.net/index.html) #programming #blog - [Arne Bahlo](https://arne.me/) #programming #blog - [Beej's Web Page](https://beej.us/), Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall, creator of many popular networking, and programming [guides](https://beej.us/guide/). He is using [pandoc](https://shared.btbytes.com/p/pandoc) for his newer [books](https://beej.us/guide/bgnet0/). - [ajkprojects](https://ajkprojects.com/) of [asnewman](https://github.com/asnewman) - [~hl/Hugo Landau](https://www.devever.net/~hl/) - “an online dustbin where you leave your collected written thoughts” — someone describing this website - [Chip Huyen](https://huyenchip.com/); well put together front page and an informative website. An excellent personal website. - [John Jacobson](http://johnj.com) -- programming and visual arts. - [josh avanier](https://avanier.dev/) - code, photos, draw, generative art. - [XXIIVV — about](https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html) -- another member? of the [100 rabbits collective](https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/hundred_rabbits.html) found via [avanier's page](https://avanier.dev/ara) - [Brad Woods Digital Garden](https://garden.bradwoods.io/) -- Notes about creative coding on the Web; see [7GUIs](https://7guis.bradwoods.io/) - [Interactive Storytelling Tools for Writers | Chris Crawford](https://www.erasmatazz.com/index.html) "This website has been in operation since 1996. It is older than Google, Netflix, Facebook, and Amazon. It still runs on a server using vacuum tubes." - [LukeW Ideation + Design \| Digital Product Strategy & Design](https://www.lukew.com/), esp AI related - [Ordinary Abundance](https://ordinaryabundance.com/) -- Edward Bellamy once imagined that music on demand would be "the limit of human felicity." A modern apartment is full of things that once drew the same kind of awe. ## Meta * [Tiny Awards](https://tinyawards.net/) "a small prize to celebrate interesting, small, craft-y internet projects and spaces which basically make the web a more fun place to be." * Sumit Khanna -- [A History of Personal and Professional Websites](https://battlepenguin.com/tech/a-history-of-personal-and-professional-websites/) -- nice recollection of his websites '90s to now. * [Show your personal websites | Lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/b7lt29/show_your_personal_websites) Jan 2020. Interesting collection of websites, mostly static (expected, considering its a lobste.rs user). * [HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156868) - [www.marginalia.nu @ marginalia.nu](https://www.marginalia.nu/) -- search engine (" DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."), encyclopedia("This is a what-if experiment in web design: What if we designed web-sites according to print principles, an experiment in web design, a high-readability, low-distraction encyclopedia with design choices such as narrow column widths, high line-spacing and a consistent typeface."), website explorer("This is a game where you explore more or less random and obscure websites around the Internet, based on the database of the [Marginalia Search Engine](https://search.marginalia.nu/).") - [twitter thread "Reply with a link to the best web dev portfolio you've seen"](https://x.com/t3dotgg/status/1694507736673743014) - [Webring](https://webring.xxiivv.com/) by [Avanier](//avanier.dev/); see also [applianceri.ng - Appliance Ring](https://applianceri.ng/) - What to keep in mind while making websites -- [Rediscovering the Small Web - Neustadt.fr](https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/) by [Parimal Satyal](https://neustadt.fr). - [Protoweb](https://protoweb.org/) --  [a community-driven public service](https://protoweb.org/about/) that hosts historical Internet websites to demonstrate the Internet in its early days. Its goal is to rebuild and restore early Internet services to offer a seamless browsing experience. - [neugierig.org](https://neugierig.org), site of Evan Martin, who [blogs about programming and technical topics](https://neugierig.org/software/blog/) ( Chrome, [Jujutsu](https://shared.btbytes.com/p/jujutsu) etc.,) - [Aman Bhargava](https://aman.bh/) (amah.bh) form Bengaluru; blogs on design, data and code. See [How Bangalore Uses The Metro](https://diagramchasing.fun/2025/how-bangalore-uses-the-metro) ## Related * Search engine for searching people’s personal websites: * [Text-only websites](http://web.archive.org/web/20181123020550/https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html) by [Sijmen J. Mulder](https://sjmulder.nl/en/) * [Into the Personal-Website-Verse · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer](http://web.archive.org/web/20190512111529/https://matthiasott.com/articles/into-the-personal-website-verse) ## Portals * [Zoroastrianism](http://web.archive.org/web/20090202120730/http://heritageinstitute.com/zoroastrianism/index.htm) portal. --- See also: - [my-websites](https://shared.btbytes.com/p/my-websites)