About this blog

This is a blog about boring websites: the internet's quiet, strange, single-purpose corners, and the people and ideas behind them. It is a field guide to the sites that do one odd thing and do it well, from an endless lifelike cat purr to a scroll that runs to the bottom of the ocean, a globe you spin to tune into local radio anywhere on Earth, and a page that just wants you to split one more log. A new piece goes up most days.

What you'll find here

Short write-ups of the web's overlooked corners: single-purpose sites, generative toys, digital oddities, dead-simple tools, and the occasional rabbit hole about whoever built one. Almost everything covered here was made by someone else, somewhere else online. Sometimes the post is about the site, sometimes about the subject behind it. If it is small, strange, or does one thing unusually well, it fits.

Browse the latest writing to see what that looks like in practice.

Part of a webring

The blog takes its name from the Boring Websites webring: a small family of five tiny sites made by the same person, each doing one useless thing well. A bar at the bottom of every page carries you to the next one, or rolls a die and sends you somewhere at random, and the hub lists all five in one place.

• The Bureau of Tiny Approvals, a 1978 desktop console that stamps and files absurd little exemption requests.
• The Bureau of Very Slow News, live coverage of events too slow to finish in a human lifetime.
• Just Skedaddling, one generative artwork that prefers to be left alone.
• Sandpile, a live abelian sandpile that avalanches forever and is gone when you reload.
• Today's Rock, one procedurally generated rock for the whole planet each day.

The ring is where the name came from; the writing is the reason the blog exists.

Following along

New writing shows up here first, most days. To follow along elsewhere, the best place is Mastodon, where a small bot also posts the day's rock automatically; anything submitted to X from this site turns up there too. There is no mailing list, and there is not going to be one. If you would like to get in touch, the contact page has every option.