Expert/auteur websites like Sheldon Brown's (or, one of my favorites, Ask Aaron https://runamok.tech/AskAaron/FAQ.html) are the pinnacle of what's possible with the small web. Today this kind of info ends up in an ad-ridden hosted wiki or locked away in an unsearchable discord.

There's also novelties like https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/, this probably hasn't been updated in a decade but that makes it no less interesting.

Then there's exceptionally cool demos like https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/. This sort of thing just doesn't fit in a "blog" format unless you're writing a blog about how you built it and linking out to it.

If anyone knows of a directory of sites like these (preferably with a shuffle option) I'd love to hear about it (and contribute)!

This website is the small web - self contained. It's a really good example of the Internet we had and apparently some still want. I think of it like computer graphics where you're definition of space can get bigger as you add a bunch of resources each with their own model space into the relative context of world space. The small web should define how we do that and discover things, not what or how we build within each specific model space.

Well, thanks. That small web just taught me in a very concise way a thing or two about bicicle braking technique!