:: About Early Web Links ::
Early Web Links is a directory of personal homepages, fan sites, hobby pages, and other handcrafted corners of the internet. The kind of sites people used to make just because they wanted to, not because they had something to sell.
Why This Exists
The early web was a different place. People built websites about their cats, their favorite TV shows, their rock collections. There were no algorithms deciding what you'd see. No engagement metrics. No content strategies. Just people sharing what they loved with whoever happened to stop by.
That spirit never fully went away. There are still people out there hand-coding HTML, tending personal sites, and linking to each other through webrings, blogrolls, and link pages. But finding those sites has gotten really hard. Search engines bury them under commercial results, and most people have been convinced that the only way to have a presence online is through someone else's platform.
I don't think that's true. And I don't think the personal web is dead. It's just scattered and hidden.
Early Web Links is my attempt to do something about that. It crawls the web looking for personal, independent, and handmade websites and collects them into a browsable directory, the way the web used to work. Yahoo had a directory. DMOZ had a directory. GeoCities had neighborhood pages. Those are mostly gone now, but the need for them hasn't gone away. If anything, it's gotten bigger.
The goal here is simple: make it easy to stumble onto something genuine, something weird, something wonderful that a real person made. No rankings, no SEO, no sponsored results. Just a big catalog of interesting sites made by interesting people.
How It Works
The site runs an automated crawler that follows links across the web, looking for pages that have that old-web feel. It checks webrings, blogrolls, link directories, and personal sites (because people who make personal sites tend to link to other personal sites). When it finds something that fits, it gets categorized and added to the directory.
You can also submit a site if you know one that belongs here.
Who I Am
I'm Aaron. I grew up on the early web and I've always felt like something important got lost as the internet went mainstream. Not the technology, but the culture. The idea that anyone could put up a website about whatever they cared about, and it mattered just because they made it.
I built this project because I wanted a way to find and celebrate those kinds of sites. I think the small, personal web deserves to be discoverable. It's not nostalgia (well, maybe a little). It's more that I genuinely believe the internet is a better place when regular people have their own spaces on it. Not just profiles on platforms, but actual websites they own and control.
Support This Project
Early Web Links is a one-person project. There's no company behind it, no investors, no ads. Just me, a server, and a crawler that runs 24/7 looking for cool sites.
If you enjoy browsing the directory and want to help keep it going, you can buy me a coffee on Ko-fi. It helps cover the hosting and infrastructure costs that keep everything running. But no pressure at all. The site will always be free and open regardless.