Back in the mid-to-late 1990s, there was a local Portland internet service provider called Teleport, located inside the Spalding Building on Southwest Washington Street downtown. One of the employees there had a daily feature on Teleport's website called "World Wide Web Today", which he eventually made a standalone site called WebToday.
Many other locally-based, small ISPs existed at the time, alongside community-based non-profit "freenet" systems, and many of them had similar web pages or newsletters. Before sophisticated search engines and social media, those pages introduced users to many useful and fun resources one could find online.
This page serves as a homage to that tradition, and also as a way for me to share many of the cool things I find online outside the short lifespans of social media timelines.
This will be a very eclectic one, covering many different subject matters.
The newest entry is at the top.
This interactive map shows nature restoration projects around the world and in your area.
This daily game shows an aerial photo of a random city and you have six chances to guess where it is.
Unzoomed World edition
Unzoomed U.S. edition
Do you know how to start a fire? How about telling approximately what time it is when you don't have a watch and your phone is dead? What is a "trail bread"? A "pine needle tea"? How can you find water, or for that matter, which way is the north? Learn all about important survival skills before you go camping or hiking, with this video series. A new episode every other Wednesday!
The University of Oregon has archived and digitized just about every newspaper that has existed in Oregon since the 19th century. (Note: Some of the major papers such as the Oregonian and the Statesman-Journal, as well as the defunct Oregon Journal, are not included except for issues for which the copyright protection had already lapsed. Also, publications from the CMG Oregon/former Pamplin Media-owned newspapers, such as the Portland Tribune, are not included due to copyright issues.) Whether you're looking for an issue of the Oregon Mist from 1895 or Just Out from 1995, it's there.
Historic Oregon Newspapers (U of O Libraries)
Use AddAll to check the prices on all major online booksellers (including Powell's Books) and find the best deals on new and used books. Search results include any applicable delivery charges!
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the oldest and largest digital rights organizations, has assembled a useful collection of actionable information to protect yourself from surveillance.
Every artist benefits from learning how to draw humans. No wonder why every art school requires its students to spend many hours in life drawing studio classes. While there is no substitute for living, breathing, three-dimensional art models, the second-best option is to draw from lots of reference photos. Line of Action is a great place to start practicing, for free.
While there are several online radio streaming apps exist for Linux, Radion is unique in that it runs in a command-line interface (i.e., terminal). With low memory usage, this is ideal for multitasking. Your favorite radio stations can be added by manually editing a configuration file.
Use this tool to find which county in the United States aligns most with what you value the most. You can also learn about each state and county and its statistics.
ExoRoad
by each state
comparison tool
by each county (example: Clackamas)
Online Wordpad is a simple notepad web app that requires no installation, suitable for use on public computers (such as libraries). It allows for writing and editing of plain text files, which must be locally saved. There is also a separate web app on this site for typing formatted texts and exporting the texts to PDF files. Both apps can be used inside a mobile browser.
Text editor (no formatting)
(with formatting, export to PDF only)
Delete your news apps! (July 8, 2024)
Social media fundamentally transformed the way in which people consume news, and it has become a unmitigated disaster. Social media and algorithm created echo chambers and led to the growth of hyper-partisanship, culture wars, and extremism. An old technology, Real Simple Syndication (RSS), puts users back in control. There are many RSS reader apps for both desktop and mobile devices. However, their user interfaces may be cranky and since these apps download and store content on devices, they can take up a lot of disk space. This is not to mention that you'll need to set up RSS and subscriptions on each and every device you may use. Commafeed provides an easier alternative. Just like a web-based email such as Gmail, this is a web-based RSS reader with a simple and easy-to-use interface. You can use both desktop and mobile browsers. Podcasts play directly in Commafeed.
Maybe you found an interesting infographic on someone's Instagram feed. Maybe you want to post your Instagram photos on Pixelfed. Meta has made it difficult to save pictures from Instagram on your computer. This downloader does it with ease.
Profile Downloader for Instagram
Bluesky is rapidly gaining popularity. Bluesky has a 300-character limit, just above X's 280-character limit but not as much as Threads' 500-character limit. Use Bluesky Thread Composer to write a long post and split it into a multiple post.
Books are expensive nowadays, and inflation is affecting the disposable income of many people. What if you could find a book at a nearby library (often even electronically) whenever you are on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, or the Storygraph? The Library Extension automatically looks up your library's catalog and tells you if that book is available for checkout. You can then place a hold online through your library's OPAC, or even check out an electronic copy and start reading right away with the Libby app.
For both Firefox-based and Chromium-based browsers. It does not work with Firefox for Android, however.
The Internet Sacred Texts Archive (ISTA) is one of the longest-running websites of its kind, containing a large collection of traditional religious texts from around the world.
With PDF Tool you can remove unwanted pages from a PDF file, merge two files into one or split one PDF into two separate files, "optimize" (shrink the file size of) a PDF, encrypt a PDF file, and sign a PDF file. Unique to this is that all these operations happen on your computer, inside a browser, and no files and their contents are uploaded to any server.
Typically when you go to a weather report website, local precipitation data comes from a nearby airport, which may be miles away. You can check a hyperlocal map of precipitation data on CoCoRAHS, a volunteer-powered network of precipitation statistics throughout the United States, Canada, and the Bahamas.
CoCoRAHS Interactive Precipitation Map
CoCoRAHS Data Explorer (nice data visualization!)
Did you find some random food ingredients in your kitchen and are not sure what to do with them? Is your local supermarket having a special promotion on rhubarb and kale? Did you stop by a food bank and end up with an odd assortment of surplus produce? Fret not, Food Hero is here! Find recipes and tips by ingredients. You can also find recipes with five ingredients or less, or 30 minutes or less!
Food Hero (Oregon State University Extension Service)
Héroe de Alimentos en castellano (Universidad Estatal de Oregon)
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