~ Early Web Links ~

Published in D-Lib Magazine in April 2005, this academic article by Tony Hammond and colleagues at Nature Publishing Group provides a comprehensive review of social bookmarking tools, covering platforms like del.icio.us, tagging systems, RSS feeds, and the emerging concept of the social web. It offers a detailed look at how user-driven bookmarking and tagging were reshaping information management on the early Web, making it a fascinating historical snapshot of Web 2.0 in its infancy.

Academic Kids hosts this encyclopedia entry explaining what fanlistings are, tracing the term back to Janine Mischor's creation of The Fanlistings Network in 2000. It covers the concept, common subjects, and even the opposite phenomenon known as hatelistings, making it a handy reference for anyone new to fan culture on the web.

The official home of the ASCII Ribbon Campaign, an advocacy movement urging internet users to avoid HTML email and proprietary file attachments in favor of plain text. The site explains the technical and practical reasons behind the campaign, offers multilingual resources, and provides badge graphics for supporters to display on their own sites.

The official manual for Harlowe 3.3.8, the story format used with Twine 2 for creating interactive fiction, covering every macro, markup syntax, and coding feature in exhaustive detail. With hundreds of documented commands, changers, and variables organized across thousands of links, this reference is an indispensable guide for anyone building Twine-based games or stories.

Secret Onions is a community-maintained Tor hidden service link directory focused on legitimate content, tools, and knowledge rather than scammy dark web marketplaces. Curated with an anti-surveillance, pro-privacy philosophy, it organizes onion links into categories like forums, email services, file hosting, software, and search engines while actively filtering out scam and marketplace sites.

A web directory built from the legendary DMOZ/Open Directory Project RDF database, organizing thousands of high-quality internet resources across categories ranging from Arts and Science to Regional and World languages. It carries on the spirit of the original ODP, offering a human-curated alternative to algorithmic search engines for those seeking organized, categorized links.

Jason Scott's web.textfiles.com is a sprawling archive of historical text files covering hacking, phreaking, e-zines, humor, virus research, and underground computing culture from the BBS era and beyond. It's an essential digital preservation project cataloging thousands of documents that capture the raw, unfiltered voice of early internet and hacker subcultures.

Tyler Akins' Rumkin.com hosts a comprehensive collection of browser-based cipher and code tools, covering everything from classic substitution ciphers like Caesar and Atbash to more obscure ones like Playfair and Übchi. Each tool automates the encoding and decoding process while explaining the underlying logic, making it a valuable reference for cryptography hobbyists and puzzle enthusiasts alike.

Created and maintained by Phil Gyford, ooh.directory is a curated collection of blogs organized by topic, with this section dedicated to science covering earth science, mathematics, space, medicine, and the natural world. Visitors can filter entries by country and update frequency, making it a handy hub for discovering active science blogs and subscribing via OPML or RSS.

Marcus P. Zillman's 2026 Directory of Directories is a massive curated reference collection covering hundreds of subject categories, from AI and biotechnology to genealogy and journalism. Created by a self-described eSolutions Architect and Internet expert, this long-running resource serves as a meta-directory linking to specialized resource guides across virtually every field of knowledge.