These are a loosely collected set of links shared by our contributors. We are evolving these & welcome your participation. We believe the act of reading & sharing information is, and has always been, a revolutionary act.

We resist big tech's:

• takeover of internet search
• subversion of our community discourse
• flooding of our information ecosystem with an AI-generated, confirmation-bias turbo-charged, un-navigatable sea of meaningless, truthless, texts with opaque, undiscoverable origins ::: what people have called our current state of "textmageddon" or the "textpocalypse."

The old-school act of reading, questioning, puzzling, integrating, reflecting and sharing articulate, transparent links to information is one of our superpowers of resistance. We cede it at our peril. It is the relational agency provided by the hyperlink in digital spaces that gives us ladders/bridges to each other and to particular writers/journalists/artists — sources that are being subsumed, consumed, erased by the AI profit machine (see: In a first-of-its-kind decision, an AI company wins a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by authors.

Marking up these content summaries for the web takes a bit of work & reading is arduous. But perhaps these times call for a bit of effort. Standing on street corners holding up signs, writing letters to the editor, having difficult conversations, visioning a better world ::: all of these things take time, energy, courage, dedication. But is easy & fast really the goal? Is ceding our search, reading, writing, conversations to an AI agent so it will take less work/thinking really the point? To read, reflect, grapple, & write roughly/"imperfectly" in our own voice is to be human. These acts are a prayer, a resistance, a persistance, a humble effort, a refusal to be subsumed, consumed, erased.

Documenting links, text, pathways through a torrent of the now is an insistance on remembering ::: making an imprint, an archive, a history. We surrender this to big tech in this age of surveillance capitalism, oligarchies, earth-destroying AI at our peril.

Is this work important in the large scale scheme of things? Perhaps not. But we continue as if it mattered to pay attention to the gifts of independent journalists, artists, writers, organizers, historians ::: to each other in this time of chaos, torrent, and incomprehensible change.

see a prototype experiment

W3C ::: web standards

• The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) home
• The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) home
• W3C courses
• W3C for developers
• Wikipedia entry about the W3C

HTML ::: HyperText Markup Language

Tutorials

• Learn HTML
• Structuring content with HTML
• HTML for Beginners (FreeCodeCamp)
• HTML Elements List Reference
• HTML tester

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets

Tutorials

• MDN: CSS styling basics

Markdown

how do we pass content to each other

Avoid the extra work of setting formatting specifics too early. Take control over the structure of your documents.

Markdown is like shorthand for describing structure. It is a tools for adding just a bit more information to plain text. For example, it allow us to indicate a list or this a title or a link.

Markdown is a widely used syntax that is easily converted to hypertext (the language of the websites and formatted emails).

Learning the very simple, small set of markdown codes makes you a web developer: it is an example of a mappable skill that also demystifies what is going on under the hood on the web. It allows you to keep typing while writing content instead of operating drop-down-menus. It creates explicit directions about structure (like "this is a title") instead of baking in implicit formatting instructions.

• About markdown (Wikipedia)
• Syntax & playground
• Markdown live preview
• Markdown cheatsheet

Accessibility

• ADA Guidance
• tutorials from the W3C

HTML+CSS+Javascript

adding the verbs

• Chris Ferdinandi (Vanilla Javascript)
• Interesting approach
• MDN Javascript Tutorials
• Vanilla Javascript (this site is a spoof on all those bloated frameworks out there)

This Page is Designed to Last
(https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/)

"seven unconventional guidelines in how we handle websites designed to be informative, to make them easy to maintain and preserve"

Everyone should become an HTML expert
(https://xhtml.club/everyone-should-become-an-html-expert.html)

Why?

1. it is easy to pickup and easy to master
2. it provides a better understanding of website structure
3. it allows you to attain your own web freedom

List of Manifestos of the Web Revival
(https://wiki.melonland.net/manifestos)

"There is a long history of digital manifesto writing; going all the way back to the Hacker Manifesto from 1986 and the Indie Web Manifesto from 1997...A web manifesto can be as simple as a document explaining why you wanted to create a site"

web0
(https://web0.small-web.org/)

"web0 is web3 without all the corporate right-libertarian Silicon Valley bullshit."

Breaking Tweets: A Web0 Manifesto
(https://chaiaeran.neocities.org/manifesto)

"Massive tech monopolies have consolidated and corporatized the Web and made consumers out of users, reshaping discourse into the form that best facilitates corporate profit, not robust human connection... What if we brought back the Old Web, with personal websites, moderated forums and chatrooms, and webmasters coding sites with good old-fashioned HTML and CSS? Anyone can host their own site, so there's no big monopolistic corporation sitting in the center tracking everyone's data, and everyone can make their site look and feel however they want; HTML and CSS are far more powerful than the measly offerings of link-in-bio services like Carrd or link.tree."

A manifesto of sorts; or, my love letter to the personal website
(https://aroceu.com/manifesto)

"Like many people on the internet my age, I hate the enshittification of things that used to be free and fun."

The Modern Web Sucks: And what can be done about it
(https://www.akpain.net/blog/the-modern-web-sucks/)

"The modern web is huge. It's a shame that most of it is kinda rubbish"

Old Web, New Web, Indie Web
(https://petermolnar.net/article/old-web-new-web-indie-web/)

see the list of manifestos at the bottom

Make Boring Websites
(https://dx.bearblog.dev/make-boring-websites/)

"In today's fast-paced society, there is no tool more powerful than the ability to comprehend information efficiently. Why should we give this up just for some corporate overlord's convenience?"

I'm a fucking webmaster
(https://justinjackson.ca/webmaster/)

XHTML Club
(https://xhtml.club/)

"Xtreme HyperText Movement for Luddites"

"Our websites were pretty damned ugly. Instead of worrying about window dressing, we focused on words, hierarchy, and structure. Each new page started in a text editor"

Why we hate AI
(https://gomakethings.com/why-we-hate-ai/)

"I hate AI with every fiber of my being.

• It's environmentally destructive.
• It's theft without attribution.
• It makes our work worse.
• It's wrong a lot..."

Against AI (pdf)
(https://mctavish.work/library/notesUMDPanel2023.pdf)

"Large language models in the classroom: the case for resistance"

Plain text
(https://northernaction.org/padillaText2025-06-10.txt)

What else is needed? — just the text: transcript of a speech by Senator Alex Padilla

UNIX Manifesto
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy)

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

The World Wide Web Consortiun (W3C)
(https://www.w3.org/)

"Making the web work. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops standards and guidelines to help everyone build a web based on the principles of accessibility, internationalization, privacy and security."

Kathy McTavish is a fiscal year 2025 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.