Remember when the internet used to suck less (or more, depending on who you ask)? Those were the days of blinking welcome messages, insufficient contrast ratios, cheesy songs on autoplay and unfortunate color combinations. But more importantly, those were the days where the internet was full of small, personal, weirdly specialized websites where the authors shared their passion for the the most random things. This list collects a few notable survivors from that era. If you're still confused about what this is about, visit a few of them and you'll know exactly what we mean. And please share similar gems with the community!
Note: For now, there are too few websites to be organized into sections. If this list grows as I hope it does, I will reorganize it.
Sheldon Brown - Bicycle advice, from how to shift gears to complete bike overhauls. Incredible amount of details and often opinionated advice on how to do just about everything with your bike.
Floor Elf - If you thought it wasn't possible to be passionate about tiling, you were wrong. Everything about tiling floors, waterproofing showers, and why failure in doing the above correctly may result in your dog catching fire.
Ask the Electrician - You guessed it. Mostly about all the incorrect ways that you can wire things, and how to fix those.
Piano-Ology - Don't let the somewhat fancy CSS fool you: despite a recent redesign, Frank Peter has been writing about music and piano playing for an eternity in internet-time. Besides the wealth of information from beginner to professional level, he has a warm way of writing and speaking that leaves you wishing you had him as a grandpa.
Stick Site - Everything you didn't know you needed to know about walking sticks and more specifically, diamond willow walking sticks.
RockTumbler - Although technically a commercial website, it still qualifies as a specialist website for the sheer amount of information it has on rock tumbling (and for its complete disregard of modern CSS).
SoftPanorama - A huge collection of articles about system administration, OSS and politics.
The Duct Tape Guys - Yup. A whole website. About duct tape.
The Calculator Home Page - Judging by the amount of entries in the database, this guys was really, really into digital calculators.
Contributions welcome! Read the contribution guidelines first.
To the extent possible under law, Luca Dorigo has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.