Small Web September Check-In 1: Links!
Sep. 7th, 2025 08:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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smallwebWe’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!
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!
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Date: 2025-09-11 09:23 pm (UTC)Instead, I wound up tinkering with the HTML on my fic page and decided to go ahead and create an 'Other' category for my one-fic fandoms because it will be neater in the long run if I can bucket them all in there. I've also started moving my unpublished WIPs into the main fandom sections instead of a separate section at the bottom. The rationale being: I have a bunch of WIPs already among my published fic, so the only difference with the others is that I didn't publish them at the time. But some of them I decided to house on SquidgeWorld years later, so... at that point, are they even 'unpublished'? This way, they get proper metadata, although I do have to come up with a summary xD
One of the unpublished WIPs I hadn't archived (but now have) was a Peter Pan fic excerpt, and so I decided to do the Peter Pan fics next, and now I'm having fun archiving those, including a cyberpunk AU that I serialised in bits and pieces on a dedicated blog. So that's been an unexpected trip down memory lane.
On links: I covered part of this in the check-in post, but reading the essays collected on Coy's site (and I didn't even get through all of them) really rewired my brain and made me much more aware of how, and where, I link on my site. I started thinking about links that would fit with the purpose of my personal archive, and I've now made a reclists section on my meta page (it only has two lists on it, but still! Recs!) to archive reclists that I've published. It was also nice to acknowledge those as a type of fanwork that I've made (not very many of, but I like the ones I have made). I'm also planning to link to fanworks that have been gifted to me on the site, although I haven't decided where that will sit yet.
I also plan to archive my ongoing fic archive/indie web resources list as a page on the site.
I want to give a link to This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web which I read around the same time, and which also rewired my brain, this time in terms of thinking about what type of content "lasts" on the web and how to make my site as light-touch as can be. This was what got me started down the track of minifying my imagery, which is one of my goals for SWS. I also replaced the links within my meta essays with archived versions, even when they were still live, just in case those should break somewhere down the line.
The related discussion on Hacker News is also a good read, with recommendations shared for good places to save bookmarks. It got me to download Joplin (purportedly an open-source Evernote alternative), although I haven't the faintest idea how to start using it, so I haven't done anything with it yet.
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Date: 2025-09-12 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-13 12:00 pm (UTC)I'm going to have a really long page once I get all my fandoms on there, so anything that will keep it a bit more manageable is good xD Also, I've taken to writing little blurbs about each fandom (so far; I might ditch it if it becomes a pain) and so I don't want to write them for fandoms where I literally just wrote one thing one time xD (I do have a pretty in-depth history with some of my one-fic fandoms, but still, it saves me the effort). I'm also getting around the one-fic thing with some fandoms by bucketing them in with others, like, all of my small fandoms drabbles are going to sit together, because otherwise I would have too many individual fandoms even within the 'Other' category xD