ROBBIE'S REALLY COOL LINK DIRECTORY

(updated whenever i feel like it)

The Internet is a strange place, to put it lightly. How could it not be? It's used by billions worldwide every day, hosting unfathomable volumes of information at a blinding rate of constant growth. It reflects every facet of human creativity, intelligence, community, and more often than not, downright weirdness.

But how often do most people surf the web? And no, I don't mean doomscrolling on Twitter or Instagram. I mean really surfing the web?

Most of us use the internet every day, but thanks to the algorithm-based infrastructure of social media, we rarely see more than a small fraction of it. It can be frustrating trying to escape it all, because if you're stuck in a constant feedback loop, how are you supposed to know where to start?

Enter link directories!

Link directories are just what it says on the tin! That is, assortments of links gathered in one place that tend to be organized in some manner, or tied together by a theme. If you're sick of seeing the same things regurgitated over and over and yearn to experience the net in all of its unhinged glory, this is a fantastic way to start! If that's not you, I hope you'll stick around anyway, since it's a lot of fun.

Here's a collection of neat sites I've encountered along my webventures. Some of them are useful, some of them aren't, but if it captured my attention it's on this list.

Enjoy your websurfing! 

Creative

Places you can either create or experience the creations of others.

 Visual Art

 JS Paint -- Browser-based, JavaScript-powered MS Paint recreation.

 Kidpix -- Browser-based Kidpix recreation.

 Rarebit -- Downloadable HTML/JS-powered webcomic template.

 Whiteboard Fox -- Collaborative drawing tool.

 Scanning.guide -- Guide for making quality scans.

 Glyph Drawing -- A tool that lets you make ASCII-adjacent art. Barebones, but full of potential. Try using it to design your own fonts!

 Viddy Games

 Renpy -- Simple, yet powerful open-source engine for making visual novels (best if you're familiar with Python, but its built-in tutorial will show you everything you need to know regardless)

 Haunted PS1 Demo Disc 2021 -- A delightful collection of bizarre indie horror games, inspired by the charmingly blocky graphics of the PS1 era. Links to the individual games it hosts are available on its itch.io page. Only downloadable for Windows (sorry mac users).

 Adastra -- (18+) A sci-fi romance furry visual novel. Deals with themes of class, sexuality, power struggle, and lots of political tension. Don't let the somewhat raunchy marketing fool you. For the sake of brevity, I won't list every single thing about this game that captivated me, but please just take my word for it and play Adastra. (It does have porn in it though, so adults only) (Also if you play it, go in blind. Avoid reading anything online if you can. It helps the experience so much)

 Undertale Yellow -- A fan-made prequel game for Undertale. I haven't played it (yet), but it definitely seems like one of the better UTDR fangames out there.

 Friv -- The death of Adobe Flash killed most dime-a-dozen online game portals with it, but thanks to the efforts of their creators and veteran players, a handful have survived the test of time. Friv is a flash game portal I spent all my time on as a kid (when I wasn't playing Animal Jam or roleplaying Warriors on art forums, of course), and the website as it stood in 2014-ish is still here today, nearly perfectly preserved!

 Music

 Online Sequencer -- Browser tool for making music. Fairly fleshed out. Even has a fairly active forum!

 Beepbox -- Another online tool for jammin' out sweet tunes

 Websiting

 HTML/CSS

Coding can look daunting at first, but given the amount of resources out there, it's a skill that anyone can take under their belt. Yes, even you! And what better time to start than now, in an age where the internet is in more need of authentic creative expression than ever?

 W3schools -- One of, if not the most useful resource for learning to code out there. Almost everything I know about HTML came from here! If you're looking to build a site, I'd start out with the basic HTML course, but it has a class for pretty much every coding language you can think of.

 Codepen -- A handy live code editor that shows you changes in real-time. Useful for testing smaller code snippets. It supports JS, too!

 HTML Cheatsheet -- An EXTREMELY useful resource that compiles HTML/CSS assets, generates layouts, codes and more. Everything is laid out in a very easy-to-understand way.

 Brackets -- A downloadable, open-source code editor. It's highly user-friendly and efficient, with allowance for live previews, managing multiple sites, inline editing, extensions, and more.

 Neocities -- Awesome webhosting service with additional social networking aspects. It has a built-in code editor where you can make AND publish your own site, all for free! If you don't know HTML but want to learn, Neocities is a very good place to begin.

 Graphics

 Free Blinkies -- Blinkie collection

 I Love Blinkies -- Blinkie collection

 Jansgraphics -- Graphics collection

 Betty's Graphics -- Over 14,000 graphics

 Buttonwall -- A collection of over 4,000 buttons

 Bonnibel's Graphic Collection -- Thoughtfully categorized directory of graphics

 Kawaii Sozai Web Graphics -- Graphics collection

 Gifcities --  A massive collection of gifs archived from the now-defunct Geocities. You can search by keywords, which is pretty useful!

 Blinkies.cafe -- Lets you make your own blinkies

 Repeater -- Tiled background maker

 Internet Bumper Stickers -- Only slightly more unhinged than blinkies.

 Tiledbgs -- A collection of tiled backgrounds from sadgrl.online.

 Site Add-ons

 Status.cafe -- Add a short status to your site

 Websiteout -- Add a visitor counter to your site

 Bear Blog — A free blogging host.

 Proboards — A free forum hosting service.
 Webneko -- Little pixel kitty that follows your mouse around

 SCM Player -- A cool JS-based music player plugin. No downloads needed.

 Gifypet --  Adds a little interactive pet to your site. You can even customize it with your own art.

 98.css -- A free Windows 98-styled CSS pack

 Terrible Ideas -- Custom CSS tags for neat text effects

 Layout Builder -- A great tool that generates responsive layouts, again from sadgrl.online.

 Eggramen -- Free site layouts

 CSS/edge -- A cool site from 2001 showcasing some neat CSS tricks.

 Blogswitch -- Cute effects to add to your site. All the text is in Japanese, so if that's not a language you speak, it may be a tad difficult to navigate.

 MF2FM -- Cool HTML snippets

 Scripted -- More cool HTML/CSS snippets

 Winamp Skins Museum -- A bunch of winamp skins

 Personal Sites

Webpages made by people like you and I.

 Make Front-End Shit Again -- Yep

 This site is dedicated to Velma Dinkley and Scooby Doo! -- A site entirely dedicated to Velma from Scooby-Doo, as the name would imply. Maintained since 2002

 Gravenimagecat -- A FurAffinity user who posts gravestone photography.

 FATMOUSE -- Fatmouse

 Welcome to the Earthbound Cult -- A fansite for Earthbound

 Frutiger Aero Archive — A fansite for the Frutiger Aero design trend

 Y2kid -- Heavy epilepsy warning for this one, and I MEAN heavy.

 Aconfuseddragon's art and nostalgia corner -- Cute vaporwave-inspired site

 Webmaster -- “If webmasters were magicians, then the web was our magic.”

 The Dorgon Zone -- Site belonging to a person named Dorgon

 1999x -- Art and personal homepage

 Blue VMU -- Site dedicated to the Sega Dreamcast console

 Cameron's World -- A collage project of some kind?

 plasticdino -- Cute pastel rainbow-y site with beautiful collage artwork

 Tinypaws -- Site dedicated to a very adorable chihuahua named Pixie!

 Agarr -- Homepage of a person named Danny

 Oj.com -- Someone liked orange juice enough to make an entire site dedicated to it, and maintain it for 30+ years. You've gotta respect the grind. Or the pulp? The juicing??

 Luke's Homepage -- Website of a guy named Luke Smith

 Sbbu -- Fansite for Neon Genesis Evangelion

 Arkm's World -- A website with a navigation style like you're walking through an old Victorian house

 Internet Explorer Is Evil -- I think this guy might not like Internet Explorer

 Logan Whitehurst's Official Website of Luv and Stuff -- Logan Whitehurst was a favorite musician of mine who passed away in 2006. You can view his site just as he left it here

 The Internet Pizza Server Home Page -- Piping hot pizza delivered fresh to your computer screen

 Lawn19 -- A webring project advocating for a decentralized Internet, as well as a love letter to the old web

 Superbad -- An experimental site?

 yyyyyyy.info -- What is going on here.

 Lemon Demon -- These are getting harder and harder to explain

 Barney Fun Page -- Hell

 Miscellaneous 

 10 Minute Mail -- Gives you a temporary email address that expires after 10 minutes. Good for stuff like getting promo codes on online stores without having to commit to an eternity spent in spam-mail hell.

 Archival

Despite the drillings of your elementary computer lab teachers, the notion that "everything on the internet lasts forever" is gravely misinformed. With constant pushes for advancement at a blinding pace, what's standard practice today could be rendered obsolete tomorrow: Adobe Flash, Geocities, Angelfire, niche password-protected forums, that YouTube video you were obsessed with as a kid but can’t find anywhere now; the list goes on and on, and it’s being added to every second of every day. Like the dinosaurs with prehistoric Earth, things that once ruled the internet will leave only fossilized remains in our memory once they’ve been swept away by the sands of time.

Archival is a topic I'm very passionate about, and especially so on a platform as unpredictable as the web. It’s quite possible we’ll live to see a day where Instagram and Twitter fall defunct. Nothing lasts forever on the internet, but fortunately there are plenty of things us netizens can do to preserve the things we love on the digital superhighway :o)

Some of these resources display archived material, some are tools for you to archive stuff on your own, and others are sort of a mix of both.

 The Wayback Machine -- A massive database archiving over 880 billion webpages. It doesn't matter if the site is defunct -- if it's archived here, you can look at it and interact with it. You can even view older versions of websites and submit your own webpages to be archived! A wonderful tool for research as well as entertainment.

 Archiverse -- A database archiving over 539 million posts, replies, profiles, avatars, communities and more from the now-defunct Nintendo social media service, Miiverse. That's 17 terabytes of data! It honestly blows my mind how much they managed to catalog. If you're someone who has a lot of nostalgia for the Wii-U days, I'd definitely recommend giving this site a look sometime.

 Flashpoint Archive -- A huge archive of salvaged flash games and animations.

 The Lemonade Stand -- A neat archive of Lemon Demon/Neil Cicierega related stuff.

 The Cutting Room Floor -- Huge archive of deleted/unreleased video game content.

 Spriters Resource -- Spritesheet rips from video games.

 Flyer Fever -- Archive of old video game posters. Goes all the way back to 1983!

 Malware Museum -- Various media-player displays of old malware programs. Now you can simulate the visuals of a malicious computer virus without actually risking your computer!

 Ikea Museum -- Archive of old IKEA catalogs, dating all the way back to the 50s. A lot of it is very reminiscent of old-school retro-futurism art. All the text is in Swedish, so if that's not a language you know, it might be a tad difficult to navigate.

 Down Them All -- Tool that lets you download all the images on a website.

 TumblThree -- GitHub tool that lets you download archives of entire Tumblr blogs. 

 Single File -- GitHub tool that lets you download an entire site as an HTML file.

 Anna’s Archive -- A massive online library with over 143k+ digitally archived reading material. The creators also run a blog discussing various contrivances related to digital archival.

 Learn

 Sharpest View of the Andromeda galaxy -- A zoomable 69,536 x 22,230px image (approx. 1.5 billion pixels total) of the Andromeda galaxy. Its file size alone is of stellar proportions.

 Astronomy Picture of the Day -- A new photo of space for every day of the year, curated by NASA. I recommend checking the calendar section for the photo featured on your birthday!

 The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme -- A collection of slightly unhinged tech/computer-related knowledge, organized in the 'iceberg' meme format.

 Deep Sea -- Explore the ocean's different levels, and learn about the creatures living in them.

 Evolution of the Scrollbar -- Ever wonder how the first scrollbar looked? Wonder no longer.

 Killed by Google -- A list of services Google has discontinued.

 info.cern.ch -- The first website ever!

 The Yesterweb -- A collaborative movement dedicated to "progressively transform[ing] the culture of the Internet and beyond."

 Fun stuff

 The FuMP -- Stands for The Funny Music Project. "A collaborative effort made up of a team of talented comedy-musicians, dedicated to giving you the best new comedy music around."

 Last Page of the Internet -- The very last one.

 DON'T YOU LECTURE ME WITH YOUR THIRTY DOLLAR WEBSITE -- A soundboard with various meme sound effects.

 Water UFO -- Someone's UFO fan project

 UFOs -- More UFO stuff

 Noclip.website -- View 3D video game worlds from the comfort of your browser!

 The Worst Things for Sale -- A collection of terrible things being sold online. Includes top-of-the-line products such as a tie made of chainmail, gasoline-powered blenders, and 275 gallons of lube?

 Kiss This Guy -- A collection of misheard lyrics

 The Old Robots -- Site dedicated to retro robotics

 Cats on Routers -- a gallery of cats on routers.

 Is It Christmas? -- Find out if today is Christmas or not with a simple click!

 Save Walter White -- Briefly featured in Breaking Bad.

 Pen Island Pens -- Just a totally normal website with a URL that is DEFINITELY NOT humorous or funny in any way.

 Reading Material 

to quench your thirst for knowledge.

 Comics

Dive into a fantasy world from the comfort of your computer monitor!

 Webcomic Ring -- A neat webring for webcomics on Neocities.

 Goodbye to Halos -- "An action-adventure modern fantasy webcomic with an entire cast of queer characters, starring a gay trans girl and her weird friends!"

 Dog Haus -- "An independent webcomic that follows the daily life of a dog girl named Maggie."

 Lackadaisy -- A webcomic about "a troupe of jazz musicians and unlikely gangsters running a St. Louis speakeasy in the era of Prohibition. It falls somewhere in the realm of historical fiction, drama, dark comedy, and abject nonsense."

 Chronically Silent -- "Comic strips about my deaf life including sign language and silly adventures."

 Paranatural -- "A comedy/action comic about a group of superpowered middle schoolers fighting evil spirits and investigating paranormal activity in their hometown."

 Stand Still. Stay Silent -- "A post-apocalyptic webcomic with elements from Nordic mythology, set 90 years in the future. It's a story about friendship and exploring a forgotten world, with some horror, monsters and magic on the side."

 Cucumber Quest -- "A comic about bunny kids going on adventures and having fun."

 Lady of the Shard -- "A comic about an acolyte in love with the goddess she serves."

 Lab Rat -- Probably best to not read if you've not played the Portal series (unless spoilers don't bother you), but worth a shot anyway for the beautiful art.

 El Goonish Shive -- "A strange comic about a group of teenagers and the bizarre, often supernatural, situations that they face."

 Garfield -- Garfield

 Articles

 Computers are an inherently oppressive technology -- An article about the ruthlessness of machinery.

 The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simple HTML -- An article on browser accessibility + how less is more when it comes to effective web design.

 The XY Problem -- An article on asking effective questions.

 A Field Guide to Web Accessibility -- In an age where the Internet is available to more people than ever, making your site accessible is crucial. If you're not sure where to start, I highly recommend giving this guide a read!

 60+ Cover Letter Examples -- A huge catalog of cover letter examples for almost every profession you can think of. Includes tips and tricks for writing them yourself.

 Some tips for website creation and upkeep -- Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I wrote this one! Just some general tips for beginner HTML coders who might be looking to create their first site.

 Wikipedia pages

Wikipedia is the largest digital reference database to date, so it's no surprise that it covers a wide array of strange subject matter. These are just a couple highlights.

 List of music considered "the worst" -- Includes such classics like "Barbie Girl" by Aqua, "It's Everyday Bro" by Jake Paul, and "Friday" by Rebecca Black.

 Spite houses -- Houses that exist solely to irritate, obstruct, and generally be dickish.

 Ruth Belville -- A 19th-century con-artist who sold people the time. Yes, people paid real money to be told what time it was. Clients would pay to look at her watch and adjust their own.

 Roar (1981) -- Many actors were harmed in the making of this film.

 List of incidents at Disneyland resort -- The most magical place on earth, or the most dangerous?

 Human mail -- A list of people who have traveled by mail, which is exactly what it sounds like.

 Bummer and Lazarus -- Two stray dogs who became unlikely best friends.

 Wow! Signal -- A radio transmission received by an Ohio university in 1977, believed to hold extraterrestrial origin.

 List of hoaxes on Wikipedia -- Being free to edit is Wikipedia’s greatest strength, but it certainly isn’t without drawbacks. This is a list of incidents where the wiki’s collaborative nature has been taken advantage of for nefarious purposes.

 Tunguska Event -- A giant explosion of nebulous origin that occurred in 1908, theorized to be the result of a microscopic black hole passing Earth. (Here's a podcast where some nerds talk about it)

 Toast sandwich -- Look no further for the exhilarating culinary experience you've been waiting for.

 Salmon chaos -- Some people go to pretty far lengths just to pay less for sushi.

 Gävle Goat -- a Swedish Christmas tradition involving flammable goat statues and arson.

 Social 

 SpaceHey -- A faithful fan recreation of MySpace during its golden age. Very active and highly customizable!

 Dreamwidth -- A blogging site with allowance for RSS feedrolls. Not too different from SpaceHey, and definitely not lacking in customization options, but is much less active.

 Toyhouse -- A site for storing original characters and their info; complete with an active forum and allowance for roleplaying, worldbuilding, and trading. You need an invite code to join, but those are pretty easy to find.

 Proboards — A free forum hosting service.

 Refsheet.net -- A more user-friendly, 'professional'-looking alternative to Toyhouse that doesn't require an invite code to join. It's far less in-depth than Toyhouse in terms of organization/worldbuilding, but you might prefer it if you don't want to go looking for an invite code.

 Artfight -- An annual art-trading game taking place every July

 Cinni's Oekaki Board -- A cute art-centric forum with a built-in drawing studio

 Melonland -- A forum ran by Melonking

 Pixeljoint Forum -- A forum for everything pixel art. Subsection of pixeljoint

 Wii U Forums -- A forum dedicated to the Wii U console

 Friend Project -- Another MySpace fansite, very similar to SpaceHey

 Escargot -- A downloadable MSN Messenger recreation. I plan on making a guide on how to download and use it, but as a brief run-through, you'll want to first create an Escargot account. Then click on the downloads page, select "MSN/Windows Live Messenger", and make sure you download a patched version. Once that's done, you're all set! When you sign in to the messenger, make sure to use your Escargot email (yourescargotusername@escargot.chat) and not your personal email.

 Leopets -- A Neopets private server "dedicated to the nostalgia of pre-conversion Neopets." Applications to join open on the first day of each month.

 Chicken Smoothie -- A site where you can adopt cute virtual pets, complete with a forum, dress-up challenges, and an oekaki board.

 Elliquiy -- An old-school roleplaying forum. It seems fairly active and well-moderated to this day.

"But Robbie, my burning thirst for obscure knowledge remains unsatiated still. I crave more! How can I find links such as these on my own?”

Link directories are a great way to tap the cobwebbed corners of the internet, but they're not the only way. Sometimes you have to scavenge for yourself like a hungry raccoon to get into the real nitty-gritty. Here are some ways you can take out your magnifying glass and become a bonafide internet detective!

- Independent search engines: Nearly everyone uses a major search engine for their daily internet browsing, but for finding more obscure content like old forum posts or personal sites, bigger usually isn't better. On engines like Google, the real gold is often hidden under pages and pages of ads and sponsored content, and time is often disproportionately spent digging through duds. Thankfully, independent search engines offer an easy fix! They can be accessed through your normal browser (so no download required) and filter out SEO, which means you'll likely find what you're looking for much faster.

 search.marginalia.nu/ -- DIY and open-source. Great for finding obscure websites related to niche interests.

 Wiby -- Engine that primarily crawls user-indexed results.

- Filters: Most major search engines allow you to filter results by typing a keyword along with the rest of your query. These are useful for finding specific results that might otherwise take a while to dig for. I'll list a few (for Chrome specifically, but should function with some variation across most major engines):

•  Searching before or after a certain date

• before:yyyy/mm/dd
• after:yyyy/mm/dd
• Can also just type the year and exclude mm/dd

•  Results without a certain word

• -word

•  Result must contain a specific word

• "word"

- Browsing Neocities: A majority of these links I've collected just from surfing people's personal sites on Neocities.org. Lots of people have made their own link directories, and on top of being useful for finding new & interesting information, it's a ton of fun! Try using the search functionality to search for sites tagged 'links' or 'link directory' (or really anything that interests you -- there's practically a site for everything).

Last Updated: 7/10/25

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