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.
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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Copyright 2022-2024. 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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