I love the web – in all it’s world wide wonder. I particularly love the small web, a beautifully idiosyncratic name for a very large cohort of geographically and culturally disparate humans who share their unique voices as they see fit to, on their own domains, in their own words.

The small web is the web of yore, it’s non-commercial, it’s scrappy, and it belongs to all who believe in it. Small eschews large, small spurns the myopia that the pursuit of fame and ‘engagement’ create, small is human scale. This page will be host to some of my favourite artefacts of this wild web, I’d love to hear about yours.

Devon Zuegel consistently weaves threads together and then un-picks them before your eyes, leaving you adrift in quiet wonder. That habit has made her one of the few writers who’s work I will read regardless of whether it touches upon my interests. Her accessible, humble style of writing briefly conceals her brilliance, but read a few of her pieces and you’re sure to notice the pattern: meaningful insights from an uncommonly curious person’s experience of the everyday. Take Independence for whom, ostensibly a quick bit of trivia about a unique California housing development becomes a provocative take on the impacts of genius on communities and their independence.

Parimal Satyal feels much the same way as I do about the growing hostility of the web and his long essay Rediscovering the Small Web is a beautiful reminder of what is lost by the rise and rise of the commercial at the expense of the personal.

Craig Mod is a walker, a writer, and a photographer who also likes toast enough to have self published an incredible book about it. His newsletters (Ridgeline, and Roden) are always a treat for your inbox. Dive in, you’ll not regret it.

Dan Luu’s blog is ugly as sin, two lines of CSS would make it immeasurably more readable, but his deep dives on latency, debugging, CPU’s, and more are brilliant and insightful. If you’re into hardware, read his exploration of keyboard latency, and then read everything else he’s ever written.

Derek Sivers’ site is a good place to go when your struggling with a problem, it’s peppered with a lot of small, easily digested wisdom and a perspective that only a life spent doing things a bit differently can deliver. Read It’s all who you know?

Jeremy Wagner has sage advice to temper the onward march of technological bloat on the web. ’Make it boring’ exemplifies the thesis that is at the core of his writing and his work.

Jason Kottke has been writing at kottke.org for almost as long as I’ve been alive. Early web, an immense catalogue, a pioneer and a steward of this thing called blogging.

Idle Words, home to Maciej Ceglowski has been a recent discovery for me.

Three Quarks Daily counts many of the worlds prominent contemporary philosophers, physicists and writers among its readers. You would be hard pressed to find a richer aggregation of humanities thought output.

Rachel Kroll is a virtuoso sysadmin, her blog is a trove of novel wisdom that touches almost every dusty corner of the datecentre and the systems that hum within. Systems are often no more stable than a house of cards, Rachel has seen it all and solved most of it. I like ’Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory’ as an entry point but the whole site is diamonds so start anywhere.