Small Web September Check-In 1: Links!

[enchantedsleeper]

We’ve reached the first check-in point for Small Web September! How is everyone doing so far? Whether you’re just getting warmed up or are already ticking off goals (or maybe you just found this and want to join – welcome!), come and share your progress in the comments of this check-in.

The theme of this week’s check-in is links! Earlier this year, I came across Coy (osteophage)’s link compilation in praise of links, which led me down a rabbit hole of reading various essays about the importance of hyperlinking and being a good steward of the web. This includes not making your own site into an effective dead end, but sending people on to interesting destinations via links that you’ve included there.

I’ve always been a lover of curating cool webpages and sites, but it struck me that I wasn’t actually doing much of this on my own little website – now, it’s a personal fanworks archive, so you could argue that linking out to random pages is a bit out of step with the purpose of it. However, it broadened my thinking about where I could start adding more links: from archiving rec lists to linking out to gifts that other fans had made for me over the years.

So, the discussion starter for this check-in is: how do you link, and to what? Do you have a link hub or set of interesting finds? Would you like to do more with links?

As a bonus: share some of your favourite interesting links (this can be anything from thought-provoking essays to just cool stuff! They don't need to be explicitly small-web-themed, although that's great too).

And of course, let us know how your Small Web September project(s) is/are going!

As a reminder, this is the first of four ‘check-in’/comment points that will be published during the event – you can check out the schedule and dates of these posts over on the event intro. There’s no cut-off point for commenting on these, so you can add something at any time – you also don’t need to comment on them all or do them in order! The themes are a loose guide, but all discussion is welcome.

For the previous kick-off/goals post, check out: Small Web September: Kick-Off & Goals!

Comments

[finch]

Oh yeah, it's pretty straightforward-- I use variables in the CSS to set the colors for each theme, but at some point I added a fourth color and forgot to add a value for the fourth variable in the light theme. Easy fix, but again, I don't know how long it would have taken me to find it without your comment. Thanks again!

[stepnix]

I'm pretty proud of my miscellaneous links page, it's got a good mix of sites I've found really interestng and a small button wall. I have other pages for linking TTRPGs, which I'm very happy with, and linking free games, which I'd like to expand more soon. The thing I feel weirdest about is the TTRPG page, I included a couple because I felt like they weren't as well-known, but they've gotten a lot more publicity recently... I'd like the page to tell people about games they wouldn't otherwise find, y'know?

[finch]

Being social is hard!

I have one section with buttons on my site, but for the most part you're right that buttons don't necessarily make sense. If I'm putting a quote or an annotation, it's much more straightforward to use a text link.

[finch]

I hope your energy does recover this week! And those are some cool links, thanks for sharing.

[finch]

Can I ask how you ended up deciding to do the content warnings? Usually I just put it in a paragraph at the beginning of an article or post if I think I need them, but I'm curious if other people are more systematic about it.

[le_gaosaure]

Thank you, this makes me feel less alone x')

[finch]

Are you thinking about taking down the ones that have gotten more popular? I don't think you'd need to do that necessarily. I took a look and the only one on there I'm familiar with is Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast, so you're still turning people on to things they haven't heard of!

[enchantedsleeper]

That surprises and saddens me to learn that people would rather not link at all if they can't put a graphic element on it >.> I suppose they might not feel like it would fit neatly into their layout, but... in no way should having a button be some kind of requirement for the small/indie web 😅 (I don't have one for my site, though I've thought about making one). Accessibility-wise, it also strikes me as not the best because isn't descriptive link text supposed to be an accessibility rule of thumb? And you can't have descriptive link text without... text...

[enchantedsleeper]

You've still got lots of time! I believe in you 💪

As a fanvid maker, it's really nice to hear about people being excited to check out the ensuing vids! :D They're a lot of work and it's not always easy to get people interested in watching a random fanvid, so I really like Festivids because of the built-in audience that comes with it xD There's so much excitement around reveals! I've taken part twice so far and it's been a lovely time.

[linky]

Thank you so much! And happy to share. :D

[le_gaosaure]

Well, mayyyyyybe they wouldn't actually go through with it, I never actually put my foot down about this, but I've seen multiple people post things along the lines of "if you don't have a button how am I supposed to link to you?" or "one of the first things you need when you make a website is a 88x31 button" and I want to tear my hair out a little bit because no, this has nothing to do with making a website, please x')

(Also 88x31 as a standard format needs to die. It made sense when the average screen resolution was around 1024x768, but now we'd need something around twice as big to get the same IRL size in displayed centimeters and no one seems to take that into account T_T)

And yeah, accessibility! I don't even have accessibility needs on the web and the buttons walls are already feeling inaccessible to me x') I don't even want to imagine what it's like to navigate through that with a screenreader =S

[enchantedsleeper]

I loooove that you made buttons, including one for SWS, that's so cool! 🤩 Now that SWS has banners and a button I feel like it's really ~official 😂 I think these are going to be the first buttons on my site!

Nice work on the progress that you've made so far! A hobby/interests section sounds fun 👀

[supermario128]

That’s kind of the way I have it, honestly. With the article, I have the warning between my first and second headings with a CSS class to put an exclamation point in front of it with a red background (I’d link it here but I haven’t uploaded the changes yet to Neocities).

However, I’m considering if a better system is the one I already have with my fanfics, where I put my AO3-like warnings and “tags” under a details, so people are given the option to look or not look at them. This is probably the way to go if you have a long list of warnings so it doesn’t take up much space unless you open it up (or, if you’d prefer it to be already opened and then people have the option to close it, I know that’s also an option with details).

If a content warning tends to apply to a majority of the pages, I’d prefer putting that as a blanket warning on the home/about/disclaimers/whatever-makes-most-sense page.

Sorry if this weren’t the most helpful; I’m still figuring it out myself.

[ravensilversea]

Ngl, if someone's that committed to having all their links in a button wall, it's relatively easy to style a link as a button with CSS, and you don't even have to go and add alt-text for it because screen readers (should) read the text displayed in the button. For linking with site buttons, I use the "alt=" attribute to identify them as "[site name's] Site Button" for screen readers.

Unfortunately, the flaw of accessibility is its reliance on the individual webmasters to care enough to make their sites as accessible as possible. I think it's important and do my best to make my site as accessible as possible within the scope of my abilities, even if it's a right pain to recode things as I discover new accessibility tricks. But at the same time, having alt-text for my decorations helps me keep track of them tbh 😅

[bookscorpion]

I hadn't laid out specific goals for this but I am now leaving the editor view of my link directory open in a tab and I have been adding things to it regularly.
I am using osteophage's Bibliodex template for this - I was looking for a tag to tag my links for better searchability, and the template was exactly right for what I want to do. I will probably split this up later into several categories ect. and I am already adding filter tags that are not yet active to the cards so that will be easier once I get to that stage.

I also figured out finally that the Gemini protocol browser Lagrange has an APK (scroll down the list to find it), so I installed that on my phone and now I can use Geminispace on mobile and do a post or two for ROOPLOCH, the Remote Outdoor Off-Grid Phlogging Challenge. I'm Bookscorpion over on Station (a place for people to set up personal blogs/capsules and dock them to the main Station site, pretty active).
Edit: the last two are Gemini links - if you want to be able to open these in a normal browser, you can use Smolnet Portal

[caramarie]

I did not have a productive first week of September, but I used this post as a prompt to collate my kdrama fanwork recs on a page, which was a thing I'd been meaning to do :)

I don't have a more general links page, although it's on my to-do list. Mostly for sites I don't want to forget the links for, but which aren't in my usual set of open tabs. Like this Hong Kong Cinema site I love. I think I first found it via a Wayback Machine link, and I assumed it didn't exist anymore but last time I went to found out I worked out it was still around!

[le_gaosaure]

Good point about it being easy to emulate with CSS! Counterpoint being that many folks don't know how to use CSS and I don't know what's the Venn diagram of "buttons fan" and "what's CSS?" ^^"""

As a hobbyist webmaster, accessibility sure is endless learning x') I'd need to recode my fic archive one day, but I'll keep that for after I finish uploading my backlog to the craft archive... =')

[stel]

i've been working on my links page recently! i made the decision a bit ago to consolidate my webrings and text cliques on my links page, since my index page was getting a bit full. i also had some bookmarks on my links page, but i'll most likely move those to their own page (it'd be cool to have a big table with checkboxes for filtering, maybe?).

i also have (had? may prune it) a uses page which i find very fun—it's cool to see what tools people regularly use! unfortunately i suffer from the curse of not knowing how to organize stuff, so i'll have to reorganize the page a bit if i choose to keep it.

i've also been making an effort to get my site on a few directories and listings! i'm currently on the responsive web directory, and i'd like to join the accessible net directory but i'm not yet sure if my site qualifies.

outside of my links page, i also have some recommendations on my reading page (maybe i'll do something similar for my watching page?) and links to some tabs i like on my guitar page.

overall, working on my personal site has been going pretty well! most of my roadblocks are just related to my indecision, which i'll get over eventually

[javert]

It turns out posting daily on Dreamwidth sapped my energy more than I expected (although I suspect getting nerfed by allergies was a big factor) so I'm late to the check-in and don't have much to report. I'm hoping the rest of the month will go better, but if I have to be honest, I'm not super optimistic...

I finished my fanlisting! It's up and running and has been addded to TFL. \o/ I'm probably going to update it with the new members I got sometime before the end of the week. I have to update my collective's index with it, too... So I'll probably do that at the same time. I'm pretty happy with it, although the layout isn't as tight as I would have wanted it to be. I've been fiddling with it for so long though, I have to stop messing with it, if only for a bit... I do want to tighten up the code at some point and make it more accessible.

Re: links, right now I just have a links page on my fansite. I'm planning on moving the non-Pokémon links to my personal site whenever that's ready. I like the button wall format, but I might rework it so the links have a description of their content, maybe in a table, later. It'd also allow me to link to sites that don't necessarily have buttons, which would be nice.

As for doing more with links, or having a links page that's more resources oriented... I'm not sure. Maybe it'd be something nice for my personal site. I'm bad at organizing the links I save from around the web, so it'd probably be helpful for me if nothing else. I'm 99% sure I've linked to it here before, but I'll still rep my friend marinehaddock's compiled webdev links from this year's Citrus Con, which includes links from my own stash.

[annathecrow]

I surprised myself and managed to get the technical part of my September goal done! And so behold, https://annathecrow.net/ is live!

I even wrote a tutorial on self-hosting static sites in Docker. That was probably a waste of time, who's gonna read this kind of stuff here on DW? But hey, maybe I'll be surprised :D

This is probably more on the borders between small web and self-hosting. I still think it belongs though, since the form is small, if not the setup. And really, this kind of thing - a low-powered computer running a few Dockerized apps, including something public-facing like a static site or a blog - is really damn "small web", IMO.

[hojarasca]

When it comes to links, there are a few things which come to mind…

1. A while back I came across aaron straup cope’s blogpost, continuous partial mythologies, which I definitely think is worth a read. But as far as this discussion goes, the important thing is that at the end of the post, it has a “This blog post is full of links.” disclaimer which links to a page that just… lists all the links in the post. I found this idea really interesting and think that with static site generators these days, you can do a lot better, and embed a list of most or all of the links on a page right at the bottom, maybe in a <details> element if you like. What I have done in the past is scraped the page during generation for links with a title attribute, and grabbed all of them and made their titles into the link text in the end.

   I think this is very use·ful, both to people returning to a page after reading it once (so they don’t have to hunt thru the page for a link they remember clicking), and also on the first read, since people may not want to break up their reading flow to click on a link and it’s good to provide another opportunity at the end. I of course want people to read the pages I link to (that’s why I link to them!), and having a list at the end of the page can help people find any that they have missed.

2. The second thing which must be stated when it comes to linking is that linking only works when people are good web citizens and make their pages linkable. A webpage is linkable if it has a URL which is accessible and does not change. In smallweb spaces sometimes people try to be edgy punks and go all “Cool URIs don’t matter who cares about maintenance or planning I’ll move my pages around every day”, but the people hurt by this are other smallweb folks who now have to go thru all of their links, find all of the dead ones, discover their new URLs, and update all of their pages. This is a lot of work and one of the biggest maintenance burdens to running a website, and one of the reasons that links pages stopped being a thing. It’s really important to put some planning and care into the URLs of your pages before you publish them, set up redirects for ones that you move, and generally do what you can to reduce the negative impact of your actions on other people. If 20 people have linked to your page, then by one URL change you have created work for 20 people!

   Anybody who has run a website for a long time and cares about linking probably knows the flipside to this, which is that the number of redirects that you wind up having to maintain just to keep old links functioning can grow quite large quite fast and be its own kind of pain. There are some techniques and bestpractices for reducing this burden, but the most important thing is just to consider “does this seed have room to grow and change” before you go and plant it in a cramped corner of your garden.

[enchantedsleeper]

That was probably a waste of time, who's gonna read this kind of stuff here on DW? But hey, maybe I'll be surprised :D

Hey, this place exists, doesn't it? xD But also, a good resource is a good resource, and it can be shared around and linked to regardless of where it's published :D I love that you wrote up a tutorial on what you accomplished! And congrats on completing the technical part of your SWS goals!

And really, this kind of thing - a low-powered computer running a few Dockerized apps, including something public-facing like a static site or a blog - is really damn "small web", IMO.

Oh, absolutely it is. Besides, I don't think that self-hosting precludes something from being small web? 🤔 I'm pretty sure that's how a lot of people used to do it, back when the web overall was 'smaller'.

[enchantedsleeper]

and have mainly focused my small web efforts this week on summarising some discussion that was had about decentralisation so that it can be used for a project some people want to work on.

Oooh 👀 Sounds intriguing!

I've toyed with the idea of self-hosting something like linkding

I found out about this last SWS, and would also like to set up an instance of my own - maybe then I can finally keep proper tabs on the resources that are currently scattered across Firefox bookmarks, Chrome bookmarks, and random notes on my phone xD

I'm not sure what a good visual representation of citations would look like in practice 🤔 but I hope you can find a solution that fits your needs! ^^

[grayestofghosts]

I admittedly haven't been doing much at all for this month because this month is crazy for me so I have not really been holding myself to it, but I figured that it would probably be a good idea to say something about this post considering my personal website is a linklist, and the background theory of why I think I need a linklist and why I generally advocate for everyone to have at the very least a list of links is because of the reasoning laid out in the essay The New Yahoo. Basically the writer explains that web search as we know it right now is unstable, so links to websites that are useful are being lost to SEO and now AI at a really alarming speed, and really the only tool most of us as individuals with little resources have is to save links. So that's kind of the philosophy behind my website, Punk The Frog's Linklist, though me adding in my own writing to archive is the side project that's also included on the site now.

A new thing that I've started that I have not been updating as much as I originally intended (but who does, with these projects) is a running articles I'm reading page, because while the 'useful resources' are nice, a whole lot of the internet is structured in the form of articles which are not quite so easily classifiable because articles are kind of meant to be ephemeral. So in this case having a disorganized running list of just articles is kind of a way to respect their ephemeral nature, maybe. Or at least, there's stuff that's interesting that if put on more permanent resource pages will eventually just be clutter, but I still want to link. If that makes sense.

Now that I'm thinking about it I think I want to link to more of the artists and writers I follow on social media, in addition to the resource focus. I am really not sure I will have time this month, however.

[axolotls]

Thank you! There's loads that I've seen, both in academia and on websites, so I've gathered some links to look at when I go about designing mine~

And yeah, I'm really excited about what's been cooking. A bit too early in the process to share any details, but I'm thinking about getting the summary focused on some things where input from regular users would be great and then start some discussion around that here!