What was your favorite web page back in the day that you would visit religiously and tell all your friends about but have since lost? Did it shutter permanently or did you lose the bookmark when switching computers never to find it again?

Back in the days of printed web page yellow pages and search engines you had to submit your page to be reviewed before it was listed, I had found a page about movie easter eggs, errors and insider information. It had factoids about nearly 1000 movies ranging from obscure facts, mistakes in editing, anachronisms, funny on-set stories and the like.

It was fun to read that this character was named after the art directors niece, the stunt car is visible losing 8 hubcaps in the main chase, etc. It was amazing to read how different movies would interact (IIRC, Kim Bassinger's gasp/jump reaction to opening the door in "Batman" was real due to them having a xenomoprh from Aliens there instead of Jack Nicholson since they were filming at the same time). It was also cool to read that certain characters made cameos in other movies (most people caught that Randolph and Mortimer Duke from "Trading Places" were in "Coming to America" but there are so many other not as obvious blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameos). I never would have noticed the car visible in the background of Johnny Cage vs Scorpion in the orchard fight in "Mortal Kombat" without this page--and now I can never unsee it when I watch it.

I don't know if I lost the bookmark or if the page shut down so I deleted it but any search I've undertaken for this page in the last few decades only seems to return listicles like "21 obvious anachronisms in modern movies!" but not my all comprehensive target.

Honorable mention to Damn Interesting (although I did find that one again after a few years). Although it's underwent some turbulance and changes since I first disovered it, I would often reread the articles and gleefully looked forward to each new article when I was younger. With article names like Lake Peigneur: The Swirling Vortex of Doom it was hard not to be intrigued.

I have a large music collection and I buy some vinyl, some CDs, but mostly MP3s. I've been using 7digital lately but I don't like how they have enlisted Paypal as their payment service. Is there any other sites out there to buy MP3s legitimately?

About a week ago i made A post asking people what their favorite BBS board is, so I'd be curious to see what people answer to his question. Personally the only one i remember is emptyclosets, a forum for queer people.
Edit: By drama/story, it doesn't have to be something someone did that pissed people off. You can also include something interesting that happened on there (e.g on a Nirvana forum that used to exist, theres a micro-famous story about a user who went to a prostitute and talked about it on there)

I'm a supporter and believer in the small web and minimalist websites (i.e. NOT "minimal design" websites, which are not minimalist more often than not).
Some examples:

• Tildes.
• Sourcehut.
• HackerNews.
• To a limited degree, the different motherfucking websites (as they are, in essence, websites with no purpose).
• Members of the 512kb club (also see https://10kbclub.com/).
• Tools like Miniflux and Kanboard.
• Pinboard.in.
• And many others.

What is your experience, if any, with the small web?
Which steps have you taken (if at all) to ensure your website is not bloated?
What do you think can be done better both individually as well as globally to make the web a nicer, faster place?

Edit: So I don’t look like I don’t practice what I preach, this is my blog. I try and follow the minimalist principles.

:wave: everyone, I've been thinking about where to put non-technical blog posts and what to call them since, so far, I have bookmark/, cheatsheet/, howto/, note/, snippet/ and tutorial/ folders already[1].

I think those cover most of the things I like writing about and I intend to share, but I also enjoy poetry, analyzing movies, political commentary and writing an essay here and there.

Following from that, I kept essay/, poem/ and commentary/ around for whenever I felt like sharing some of my non-technical writings, but I don't like those folders :smile:. They seem way too granular, more akin to tags than categories, both of which are contained in each file's metadata.

Tags, however, don't feel like a "pillar"/category of a Zettelkasten/ramblings/thoughts crate. They're empty at the moment and in draft/, so it's the perfect chance to do some re-structuring and avoid the issues I faced when I ditched blog/category and chose the current structure.

In case you're asking yourself why I didn't put everything in the same folder, as they reflect categories and each .md file has category metadata already, it's because the drafts in draft/ became unmanageable (+120). So, in an effort to give myself an easier way to navigate and edit, I decided /folders were going to reflect the categories that existed. I'm aware it can be that after note #50 or something I have the same problem, and thus it wouldn't have made a difference whether notes were together with tutorials or not. I've decided to deal with that problem when it arises :)

I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts! Would you keep essay/, poem/ and commentary/ or merge them into something else? note/ are short and wouldn't feel right for longer ramblings. I am not a big fan of writings/ as everything is a "writing", prose/ also doesn't quite fit and so far the only one I've sort of liked is reflection/ since essays, poems, and comments on happenings are the result of reflecting.

/rant over, I know, I'm overthinking it. Let those not guilty throw the first stone :)

[1] I've removed quite a bit of the irrelevant stuff but kept what I believe is relevant, but feel free to ask away in case something necessary is missing.

.
├── bookmark/
│   └── sample.md
├── cheatsheet/
│   ├── sample.md
│   └── sample.md-data
├── commentary/
├── draft/
│   ├── bookmark/
│   │   └── sample.md
│   ├── cheatsheet/
│   │   └── sample.md
│   └── ...
├── essay/
├── extra/
│   ├── archive/
│   ├── blob/
│   └── robots.txt
├── howto/
│   └── sample.md
├── note/
│   └── sample.md
├── poem
├── private/
│   └── sample.md
├── snippet/
│   └── sample.md
└── tutorial/
    ├── sample.md
    └── sample.md-data/
        ├── sample.png
        └── ...

I'm a huge fan of lightweight sites. They load super fast on mobile and that's the most important thing for me. I found a number of outdated lists online and wanted to hear what your favourites are.

Here is my list.

News

https://lite.cnn.com/
https://text.npr.org/
https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news/canada/toronto?sort=editors-picks
http://68k.news/
https://legiblenews.com/
https://www.skinnyguardian.xyz/
https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/
http://skimfeed.com/
https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/text/textedition

Edit

• Lots to think about, thank you everyone!

In the 2000s, I had Blogger or a subdomain on some random free host. I even tried Ning at some point.

Since 2012, I’ve had a personal site at a custom domain, on Squarespace, then WordPress who knows where, then Tumblr, then WordPress on Linode, now a combo Bear Blog and GitHub Pages.

I dislike WordPress for how clunky it is, Squarespace for how expensive it is, Tumblr for how obviously Tumblr it is (I could say the same about Squarespace and many WordPress sites), GitHub Pages for making me use git to post. Basically, I’m not happy with anything.

So I thought I’d ask los Tildeños—do you have a personal site? What web host and tech stack are you using for it? What do you like/dislike about it? What else have you tried?

For the metalheads here, wondering what you all are reading for news, releases, tour announcements, etc that's primarily focused on metal.

I really enjoy black metal so would definitely be interested in sites/forums that focus on that!

Back in the day https://ffffound.com/ was one of my biggest inspirations for imagery and creative ephemera.

I miss it sometimes and have a vast archive of downloaded inspiration. I discovered a lot of material under the radar of pop culture.

Kind of like picking up a circa 2009 vice magazine from a shop. I was seeing and feeling things that felt textural and well curated.

Is there something around that I haven’t seen?

I see we can filter by topic tags (https://tildes.net/settings/filters), and that's nice.

What I'd also like to be able to do is filter out by site:somedomain.com.

I went to look at the tildes source code, but, in my brief visit, it didn't strike me as something I could quickly cobble a pull request together for.

The main thing I want this for is to filter out YouTube. Nothing wrong with other people liking Tildes recommendation of YT videos, but I come to Tildes for things to read, not things to watch.

Hey all. I’m sure there’s a lot of new users making their way to Tildes this week. Let’s share some Letterboxd profiles to get the community going. I guess I’ll be first! Follow me if you have similar taste and I’ll do the same: https://letterboxd.com/plo/

I know quite a controversial and opinionated question, one that might easily get blasted with downvotes on a site like StackOverflow or even Reddit! Nevertheless, one which I believe is still relevant to ask and useful one even in 2023.

The problem with backend web technologies is that we are overwhelmed with choices. Whilst getting spoilt with choices seems like a useful thing sometimes, it might easily be an impediment in decision making too. Based on my experience, there are a bunch of useful stacks and I will work on any of them if you pay me to work as a freelance coder. Each has its own pros and cons but I'm yet to find the ideal one which according to me is something that should be easy to code and deploy while also better performing at the same time.

• ASP.NET: C# is the language I started coding web apps with in my last company and ASP.NET web forms was quite the rage back then. PHP was also gaining traction in the open source world and the webdev was mostly divided between the Enterprisey .NET aristocrats of Microsoft world and the poor PHP peasants of the FOSS world! One good thing about ASP.NET was performance. Since MS controlled the whole stack, they also put great efforts at making it work faster. The bad thing, of course, was dependence on a closed tech stack and a closed black box that generated JS functionality on its own.
• PHP: When I resigned from that company and started freelancing, I came to know about open source, linux, XAMPP, etc. That was when I realized that my own attitudes and thinking was more attuned to the FOSS peasant mindset than the wealthy aristocrat's! I didn't earn quite as much in freelancing with WP, Drupal, SuiteCRM, CodeIgniter, etc. but I found great happiness and contentment in being part of the open source process. Till date, PHP remains my favorite language for backend development and most of my web projects involve CodeIgniter or even pure PHP.
• Python: Flask is what got me interested in Python web development. The sheer minimalism and flexibility of that framework is what I found quite remarkable and quite a rarity in the frameworks world. And jinja2 template system was just fantastic. The other framework called django is more popular I think and I've worked on that too but Flask still remains my favorite. Flask is good in performance dept. too but I think it gets tricky once you start scaling with too many users.
• Java: I've never really bothered with Java web development except a few tutorial experiments on the Apache TomEE server. The multi-layered approach that Java takes not only has very steep learning curve but unless you're a very gifted programmer, it's practically impossible to beat the performance of interpreted PHP/Flask!
• NodeJS: Again, not much work here except brief hobby projects like http-live-simulator. The npm packaging system really turned me off initially with so many packages and issues with that system in the earlier days. Nowadays, I've heard that it's much usable but I've never gotten into it.

And now, we also have the evolving languages like Golang, Rust, etc. taking their baby steps towards web development too! Are any of them worth giving a try? If someone were to ask you for a backend tech stack recommendation while giving equal weightage to performance, developer productivity and ease of deployment, which one will you suggest?