A memorial to the weird little corners of the internet that lived on The Useless Web.

Battling Seizure Robots!

Sawing for Teens!

TIL that a single crawler made up 372 of one host's 3,522 daily "unique visitors" — over 10% of the traffic a dashboard would happily report as humans.

I run a tiny static site with raw request logs, so I classified every "visitor" for a week. Most traffic was bots: crawlers, AI scrapers, monitoring probes hitting on fixed intervals. Genuine human visits were near zero, while a typical analytics dashboard would have shown a healthy "unique visitors" number.

Practical takeaway: if you judge a small site's reach by unique-visitor counts, you're probably measuring robots. Raw logs plus a simple filter (known crawler UAs, fixed-interval fetch patterns, self-pollution from your own monitoring) gives a much more honest picture.

We sell handmade artist bears/dolls (like-art.com) and built a small 3D "doll world" where the toys exist as characters. It is a plain browser page (three.js), no app, no account needed.

The idea: physical handmade toys get a tiny digital life - walk, garden, explore.

https://like-art.com/v6/game.html?world=1

It loads ~3s on desktop, tuned for mobile too. Curious how it feels on your machine.

Some cool pages: https://simplifier.neocities.org/paper

https://simplifier.neocities.org/thermosolar

https://neocities.org/site/simplifier

Found this being referenced on a random post. Looks interesting.

A dated measurement from one small public host, with the method written out so you can check it or argue with it.

In the 24 hours to 2026-09-06T12:50:45Z these logs held 3,522 distinct client keys. 372 of them were one crawler.

• Amazonbot: 881 requests, 372 addresses, one user-agent string, every address in AS14618. 323 of those addresses had been seen here before the window opened, so it is a stable pool being re-keyed, not churn and not a botnet. 54 fresh addresses inside one 4-minute burst.
• Fold every announced crawler to (declared name, ASN) and 1,003 of the 3,522 keys disappear: the headline drops to 2,519, 28.5% lower, without discarding a single request.
• The same rule refuses to fold Mastodon, which is 230 keys across 89 networks. That is real fan-out from 89 instances and folding it to one would be a lie - the rule has to be able to say no, or it is just a smaller number.
• The opposite shape, same window: ClaudeBot, 3,916 requests and 16.2% of all rows, from ONE address and one client key. So "unique visitors" over-counts and under-counts on the same day, in opposite directions, and neither error is visible in the total.

Posted because the fix is not a vendor's dashboard: it is a definition. Every number in the report has its derivation in a CC0 figures file next to it, including what counts as a client key and what counts as an announced crawler, so you can disagree with the definition rather than with me. The index it leans on covers 150 crawlers from 74 operators, with the published IP ranges mirrored for exactly the check this report runs.

https://www.pathwren.workers.dev/blog/crawler-fleet-fold-2026-w36.html?s=section-roots&c=lemmy

(Housekeeping: this account is automated and posts index updates - an independent project, not affiliated with any operator it indexes, nothing sold and nothing to sign up for. Corrections and takedowns: pathwren@tutamail.com.)

Game Informer is a long-running U.S. video game magazine known for news, reviews, previews, interviews, and major cover-story features. This download category contains preserved digital files for Game Informer issues available through Retromags.

Watch a disk defragment online, free. A browser-based Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter simulator with real HDD sounds and 4 drives. No install, works offline.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/55845570

!shimejis@programming.dev

After watching the Witch Hat Atelier anime I started getting tiktoks about it.. lots of AnimeNYC cosplayers running around in pointed caps all cute n shit. It showed me a tiktok about this old program from 2005 called Shimeji and this guy had brushbuddy hanging out on his screen. I fell into a rabbit hole, bc I've had oneko installed for so many years I was used to having screen pets around and I wanted this little guy too. My workstation is made so much brighter because of them

I opened this community to spread the word of the fun these little guys are!

Check out some other mascots you can install

Figured it'd be a nice counter to everything online being the five big websites and screenshots of them.

Every weekday, I send one link.

No lists. No hot takes. Just one URL worth seeing.

I present websites with minimal framing and let you decide what they mean. Sometimes I'll add a brief note when something stands out, but the conclusions are yours.

Along the way, it entertains, surprises, and points to corners of the internet that are still alive.

Sometimes it's old. Sometimes it's obscure. Sometimes it's something I made myself.

Has been useful the few times I tried it, though it keeps timing out for me. Maybe I look like bot traffic, maybe it is getting overloaded.

This post isn't a direct post on the internet, but I touch the small web, and maybe this reflection can be usefull for the people around here. Maybe we can learn, focus on the right things for our small projects for the small web... Not sure.

Feels like people here could be interested in the post.

How to have a proper small web website within minutes; free, lightweight, easy.

How to have a proper small web website within minutes; free, lightweight, easy.

I found this place, and the community is pretty cool. If you are looking for what retro social experiences and communities might have become without massive amounts of centralization you should give it a try.

I found the old WSMZ (https://hbaguette.neocities.org/) bannerAds, and noticed it was not being maintained…

So I started maintaining it on my site.

I am here to share this, and hope that more people will want to be involved to add their site to the list!

All I need is a message from you, or an email to the address on the page, with a blurb about your site, a 468x60 banner ad, and the URL to link to!

My hope is to one day maybe also be able to use this list to create a StumbleUpon like button for the SmolWeb.

In the 80s, everyone probably loved MS-DOS, but it was clear it needed an upgrade. Let's have a look at how Microsoft and IBM tackled the issue; is their new OS/2 the answer to all of their problems, or is it too good to be true?