To find a lot of these sites I have found some dead corner of the internet, then followed it back using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. But you can also do keyword searches at their Gifcities page and click into the links to find interesting sites. Did you find an interesting site? Share it with me to add to the list! Make your own list!
Before we had good search indexing and social media sites web rings were a common way to network with other site makers. You could say they were like facebook groups. Hint: click "ring index". You can read more at this Tedium article "Webring History: Social Media Before Social Media" by Ernie Smith on November 20, 2020. Also, read this great comment about webrings by brisray on November 22, 2020. And here I found a webring starter-kit.
This documentary was particularly fascinating to me and finally pushed me to start writing content on here and learning to make my pages prettier. I dug up a bunch of the links you see while watching it, for example, The Radiation Zone which seems to be affiliated with Doug Block's documentary site.
The documentary itself focuses on the writings of a college student who is traveling the country giving talks on The Web trying to promote it to people. He puts on a deliberately narcissistic persona to promote early internet culture and you watch the rise of the "web heads" and their crash—like a lot of the internet. Here is Justin Hall's home page as of January 28, 1998.
I'll be sure to update this space after watching the documentary again. It is a must watch for those of us trying to recreate the feel of the earlier World Wide Web.
It's still around! Here's thepalace.com in 2020 (WARNING http, so, unencrypted connection). Read about the history of The Palace chat software on Wikipedia. You can read more about it on The Palace's creator's personal website
In Home Page Jaime Levy (webmeister) shows her personal Palace reflecting on how communication on the Web makes it easier to say things that are harder to say off the Web. Read more about Jaime on Wikipedia. She has come a long way here is Jaime's user interface (UX) consultency firm.
A blog-like website seen while Justin Hall is doing some writing on his website.
Another blog-like website shown in Home Page.
This isn't the old site, I'll dig that up later, but it seems like Rheinegold preserved the old layout of his site. You see its launch in the documentary above Home Page.
From their Webring.org listing description "A collection of personal homepages that feature online diaries or journals."
Here's His first entry on February 3rd, 1996. Ancient...
A list of diary style home pages selected by the author of Countdown to the Big Four Zero (above). Press STOP in your browser TWICE after it loads (infinite loop reload).