Smallweb gathers essays from 160 writers who keep their own blogs, update them at their own pace, and almost always post something worth reading. There is no algorithm choosing what you see. There is no "engagement" column, no reading streak, no feed that doubles in length while you look away. The front page has a lead story, three category columns, a feature, and a departments index — and that is all.

Every writer in the library has been added by hand. Most of them are essayists, a few are programmers with opinions, a surprising number are retired professors. What they share is that they post when they have something to say, and are usually willing to wait until they do.

Why it exists

Because the web used to be a place you visited, not a place you were served. You opened five or six bookmarks in the morning; you came back to them after dinner; you closed the laptop. The writers you followed had names, faces, and the distinct habit of posting things at inconvenient times of day. That is still true of a few hundred corners of the internet, but they are harder to find than they used to be.

The small web is still here. It's just quieter.

Smallweb is an attempt to build a room where that quieter web can still be visited. The design is editorial, not social. There are no comments, no upvotes, no share buttons. If you see something you want to talk about, you'll have to do it yourself, somewhere else.

How it works

The library is a JSON file. A scheduled job fetches each writer's RSS feed every few hours, pulls in any new posts, and writes the result to a cache that the site reads at render time. Nothing is stored except titles, excerpts, dates, and links — we don't copy or serve the writing itself. When you click a post, you leave smallweb and read it where it was published, on the writer's own site. That is the polite way to do it.

The code is on GitHub; the writers are in the library. If you have a blog you think belongs here — or if one of ours has been quiet for too long — write to hello@smallweb.blog.