Links

A website should point outward.

This is one of the basic moral facts of the web, and also one of the easiest to forget. The temptation is always to treat a personal website as a little sealed container: my posts, my projects, my feed, my analytics, my excellent opinions arranged in chronological order. But the web is not supposed to be a filing cabinet. It is supposed to be a web.

So here are some links.

This is not an endorsement ledger, a sponsorship page, a list of official affiliations, or a comprehensive map of everything I read. It is just a collection of pages I like, use, trust, admire, resentfully depend on, or think belong near this site.

The neighbourhood

Kagi Small Web A useful reminder that the internet still contains actual people writing actual things on actual websites.

Marginalia Search Search for the parts of the web that have not been sanded down into SEO paste.

ooh.directory A directory of blogs. Imagine that. A directory. Of blogs. Like civilization.

PersonalSit.es A gallery of personal websites, which is dangerous because it will make you want to redesign yours instead of doing anything else.

IndieWeb The general operating philosophy: own your domain, publish on your site, connect outward.

uses.tech People listing the hardware, software, tools, and workflows they use. Obviously catnip for a certain kind of person.

uses.tech — Canada The Canadian corner of that particular affliction.

TownSquare A tiny presence layer for websites. The blog is the home. TownSquare is the porch.

TownSquare Map The funny little proof that websites can feel connected without becoming platforms.

People and sites I return to

Cauê Napier Maker of TownSquare, and generally a good example of the web still being allowed to be playful.

Simon Willison’s Weblog A very dangerous site because the posts are useful, frequent, and often make you realize you have yet another thing to learn.

James’ Coffee Blog Indie web, personal publishing, gentle web energy, and a standing rebuke to the idea that websites need to be cold.

Maggie Appleton’s Garden A digital garden that actually feels like one.

Pluralistic Cory Doctorow’s daily links and arguments. I do not always have the energy, but I usually respect the output.

Drew DeVault Software, open source, systems, politics, and a useful reminder that personal websites are allowed to have edges.

Building and maintaining websites

MDN Web Docs The closest thing the web has to a civic utility.

Zola documentation This site is built with Zola, so I spend a non-zero amount of time here muttering at templates.

The Rust Programming Language The Book.

Rust standard library documentation The place I go after pretending I remember exactly what the standard library does.

docs.rs Documentation for Rust crates. One of the nicer pieces of ecosystem infrastructure.

W3C Markup Validation Service For when I want to be told my HTML is wrong by an institution.

W3C Feed Validation Service RSS and Atom feeds deserve care. I will die on this extremely small hill.

Webmention.io A hosted way to receive webmentions without turning a static website into a whole production.

Canadian civic machinery

Parliament of Canada The mothership.

LEGISinfo The easiest way to track federal bills without losing your mind completely.

House of Commons Hansard, committee meetings, votes, order papers, and the daily machinery of responsible government.

Senate of Canada Often more useful than people give it credit for, which is an annoying sentence because it is true.

Canada Gazette The official newspaper of the Government of Canada. Dry, important, and exactly the kind of thing a functioning state requires.

CanLII Free access to Canadian law. One of the genuinely great public-interest websites.

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada A useful place to start when Canadian privacy law enters the chat.

Open Government Portal Government datasets, disclosures, reports, and other raw material for civic spelunking.

BC Laws British Columbia’s statutes, regulations, orders, and other provincial legal machinery.

City of Vancouver Open Data Portal For when the municipal government has data and I have questions.

Archives, records, and family history

Internet Archive Wayback Machine The surveyors of the web. Every personal website should occasionally be thankful they exist.

Library and Archives Canada — Genealogy and family history The Canadian family-history starting point.

FamilySearch Research Wiki A very useful guide to what records exist, where they are, and why your search is about to become complicated.

FreeBMD Births, marriages, and deaths for England and Wales. A beautiful example of volunteer transcription doing real work.

The National Archives — Discovery The UK National Archives catalogue, and therefore a portal into both historical discovery and personal suffering.

HathiTrust Digital Library Digitized books, old publications, institutional memory, and the occasional genealogical trapdoor.

Project Gutenberg Public domain books, still there, still useful, still one of the web’s better ideas.

Places I periodically regret reading

Hacker News A good place to discover interesting technical work and then immediately remember that comment sections were a mistake.

Lobsters Like Hacker News, but with a different flavour of psychic damage.

Reddit Sometimes useful. Often cursed. Anthropologically significant.

Link back

This site lives at ethanplant.ca.

If you have a personal website, make a links page. Link to your friends. Link to strangers. Link to useful documents. Link to weird little projects. Link to the pages that helped you understand something. Link to the websites that remind you the internet is not just five platforms in a trench coat.

A website without links is a house with the curtains closed.

Last updated: July 2026.