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.
Open-Access Theses and Dissertations
Open-Access Digital Theological Library
(2025-09-03)
Gay and Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest (GLAPN - now called Oregon Queer History Collective) and Portland State University conducted a series of oral history interviews with Portland's LGBTQ+ leaders and cultural figures. Full interviews are recorded and are available at Oregon Historical Society's digital collections.
GLAPN oral history project (housed at Oregon Historical Society)
(2025-09-01)
PORTScasts is a series of free virtual educational events (on Zoom) produced by California State Parks.
(2025-08-28)
Searchable archive of historic photos, mainly from Salem area (Marion County Historical Society and The Statesman Journal)
Oregon Historic Photograph Collections (Salem Public Library)
(2025-08-26)
(2025-08-21)
A searchable database of all social media posts on X and Trump Social from Donald Trump.
(2025-08-18)
Look up free and open-source alternatives to many popular commercial software.
(2025-08-16)
This course teaches the northern dialect, which is spoken mainly in British Columbia. The basic elements are pretty much the same as the southern dialect spoken in Grand Ronde.
(2025-08-16)
There's much to be said about the roles of artificial intelligence in religion, but one of the things that AI could help the overworked ministers is to do some of the grunt jobs that are time-consuming but not necessarily creative. This AI tool generates main theses and outlines from up to five Bible passages.
AI Sermon Outline Generator (OpenBible Labs)
(2025-08-15)
Different pronunciations, same characters.
(2025-08-10)
Apple Fritter is a blog and a forum dedicated to the early history of Apple Computer and its products.
(2025-08-09)
This displays a random post from Small Web sites.
Download a full list of known Small Web RSS/Atom feeds
(2025-08-07)
Public broadcasting and LGBTQ+ communities are subjects of targeted politicized hostilities these days, so it is worth remembering both at the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
"The LGBT+ Collection includes over 700 public radio and television programs and original materials contributed to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) by 35 stations and organizations from across the United States. The recordings date from the late 1950s to 2018."
(2025-08-07)
Since about 10 years ago, "software as a service" (SaaS) became the predominant model of business for computer software. Nowadays to use commercial software means having to give away your credit card number for auto-billing. I genuinely hate this, and apparently I'm not the only one.
(2025-08-03)
CoMaps is a free and open-source Android app that is fast, easy to use, and private. Maps are downloaded to your device (allow 500MB to 1GB of space either on your smartphone or on a Micro SD card), so there is no mobile data required while on the go -- and no data is transmitted to Google or any other third party. CoMaps is based on OpenStreetMap, a global collaborative project run by volunteers. You can help improve the maps by joining the OpenStreetMap, too.
(2025-07-29)
This website has been one of my go-to sources for mostly Mediterranean and Middle Eastern recipes.
(2025-07-23)
Free Music Archive was started by radio station WFMU and is a great place to discover new music and to enjoy it for free.
(2025-07-21)
This is a live cam from Churchill, Manitoba (58°47' N), on the northwestern shore of the Hudson Bay. It is on year-round and 24/7. The town is in the Central time zone (same as Chicago).
(2025-07-17)
The classic MS Edit from the MS-DOS era is now back as cross-platform, open-source software. It is written in Rust and can run on Linux by simply executing it. It is only 220 kilobytes in size, making it a very lightweight text editor by today's standard.
Download MS Edit (Linux 64-bit or Windows)
(2025-06-25)
In 1995, I got myself an "extended basic" cable TV service from TCI and one of the channels was the Weather Channel. It was a good source of background noise while I studied as all it did was to display the local weather report while playing some "elevator music" in the background.
(2025-06-08)
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Copyright 2022-2025. Articles on this site may be used freely under the terms of the Cooperative Nonviolent Public License version 7 or the latest, whichever the newer (CNPL v7+). All other uses require the express permission of the author. See the contact page (on Gemini or WWW: willowashmaple.sbs/contact; on Gopher: gopher://willowashmaple.sbs:70/0/willowashmaple/contact) for email and other ways to get in touch.
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