9th of August, 2026
Half a dozen cool small sites

What is a “cool small site”?

It's gotta be cool. That's very subjective, but personally I don't count flashy one-page tech demos or other goofy stuff. Sorry OMFGDOGS and rrrgggbbb! These might be fun or cute or surprising for a moment or two, but then you've seen everything. I guess for me a cool small site needs some mystery or depth or for something to be missing or different, and you just don't get that in a tech demo or an “I made a site every day for a month” streak. It also helps to be in a niche. Many “cool small sites” could also be “weird small sites”.

It's gotta be small. Nothing overburdened with ridiculous amounts of JavaScript, nothing that's just an open-ended platform for people to post their own work. It doesn't neessarily have to be small in page count—i-land is a few hundred pages big, but it's a self-contained artwork made by one person, and most of those pages just have one or a few images and minimal text.

It's gotta be a site. A complete site (or subdomain of a web host like Neocities) dedicated to this one thing, not a section of a bigger site. Self-contained and self-defined.

Beyond those: no blogs, portfolios, or other personal sites. It's not that “cool small sites” have to efface their creators, it's just that, no matter how interesting the person's art or hobbies or ideas, the site itself is gonna be very mundane, no matter how many juicy features they might have coded into it.

And now for the obvious stuff: no corporate marketing stunts, no cryptocurrency, no LLM stuff (to the best of my knowledge).

1: BrainFuckConsole74 #

A web console for the programming language no-one in their right mind would use, plus a whole range of little programs people have used it for.

Brainfuck is an extremely simple programming language whose gimmick is that all eight of its instructions are represented in code by single characters: <>+-.,[]. That makes Brainfuck programs a huge pain to read and write in, but n theory, you could write pretty much any modern app just in Brainfuck, it's just nobody's enough of an insane monk to actually do it.

What's left is stuff like this fantasy console that people have used to make over 50 simple little programs you can load up on the site: tools, music, pixel art, and even a few games. Check out BrainfuckPainter 1.3 by std, DEFENDER by PentaSoft, Avril 74th by SKraft! Without all these programs, BrainFuckConsole74 would just be a gimmick. With them, there's a sort of heroic perversity that makes it a bona fide “cool small site” to me. (Yeah it's user-created content, but I get the feeling the whole site and all the programs on it are part of some friend group project.)

2: plingpling game maker #

A draw-it-yourself game maker that lets you share pinball boards with other people.

This is one of those web-based game editors like Bitsy or flickgame, except it's for the much more niche genre of pinball. The Line Rider/sandspiel kinda mashup interface is clunky and idiosyncratic, but guarantees a really personal and one-off touch you wouldn't get if you could just drag and drop ready-made components onto the board. I've never actually made a full board, but I probably should some time…

3: The Museum of Modern GIFs #

An online image gallery that defies the database style of most online image galleries.

The search bar, maybe more than anything, kills my sense of a website as a specific space with digital geography. It's hard enough as it is to create a sense of travel online, where anyone can link to anywhere from anywhere, before the search bar/engine let anyone generate whole lists of these links from a central database. It's is one of the big operational modes of the internet, inescapable, sitting atop every page on any major site. (To be clear though, search is incredibly useful for finding information, and even some sites with search bars like Wikipedia still have a sense of travel if you follow links within articles.)

The Museum of Modern GIFs runs so counter to that it's basically unusable in any database-like way, as you amble through door after door, through room after randomly-generated room all pulling from the same set of about 100,000 vintage animated GIFs. It even has a bench you can click to “rest” and save your progress! Very cool, very simple.

4: Binary Piano #

From maths to music at the simplest level.

Kinda reminds me of the Thue–Morse sequence, in that it uses the arrangement of bits in binary numbers as input into something bigger and more complex, in this case a musical melody. It's like bytebeat (example composer), but obviously extremely repetitive.

While this does feel a bit like a tech demo or quick experiment, I think there's something potent in showing how you can make music from simple mathematical rules—the foundation of synthesisers and electronic music, which have been so influential over the past, what, 60+ years? Not just in music but in sound for TV, cinema, and radio plays, especially sci-fi and horror. Speaking of radio…

5: RADIO IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY #

Radio waves from the past, still bouncing off the mental ionosphere.

Way more than old TV, exploring old radio broadcasts feels like archaeology to me, at least in the sense of rediscovering and curating things lost and forgotten. RADIO IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY is exactly that, streaming thematically-arranged music from decades past and everywhere on the Earth. As I write this, I'm listening to Arif Sağ's Şu Samsunun Evleri, from Turkey in 1973; I've also been listening to World on a String, a collection of one-string veena music by Vaikom Vijayalakshmi plus some other pieces, in the site's transmission log. (I don't doubt you could find some of this stuff on youtube—if you already knew what to look for.)

6: Puparium #

Weird creatures. Art without explanation.

Just a mixed-media collection of art of freaky little (and big) guys, uploaded to Neocities six years ago and never updated. A new one's randomly shown every time you refresh the page. Although there's clearly some overlap in how they're all drawn and animated, there's enough major differences to keep you guessing at what might be next, and all the designs are so funky—weird and full of life.

The cool small site #

This is a certain kind of site that feels important, to me, to how the web exists as a cultural platform and ecosystem. It's an expression of the web as something more than just social media and e-commerce, and even something more than just personal sites and cultural archives—the simple idea that a website can be basically anything.