Introducing Single-Serving Sites
After I launched How Many Days Until Omloop, I wondered if there was a site that would list all single-serving sites. Did some searching and I came to the conclusion that there are no actively maintained sites for this.
Introducing: Single-Serving Sites. My effort to try to list all the cool single-serving sites still online.
What Makes a Single-Serving Site So Cool?
Of course the cultural impact of some of these sites is important. To me the fact that a person had an idea, registered a URL, and found some hosting just to put up a page on the internet is awesome. And then the best part: every single time when the domain is about to expire they will have to answer the question: “Should I keep the site or not?”
Sadly I failed to answer that question once. If you read the post where Jason Kottke coined the Single-serving Site term, you see I contributed a site that I built and is now gone. Maybe I should resurrect it…
My absolute favorite site: Is Milan–San Remo Exciting Yet? It’s for the longest and most boring bike race of the season, and when the race gets to the final climbs it’s the most exciting finish ever. So every year the site’s owner is watching the race, and when the race gets to the final ~30 minutes they change the site to YES. Would love to find out who is behind this site.
Back to Single-Serving Sites, the date shown for each site is when the site may have been launched. In order to find those dates I checked the Wayback Machine to figure out when the site was first saved in the Internet Archive. Not acuruate, but it’s a start.
Sites that are not cool and will be excluded:
- Commercial sites. Do Nothing for 2 Minutes is kinda cool, but ultimately it is just a marketing site for Calm.
- Multiple pages sites. An extra About page is okay, but any more is no bueno.
- Sites with ads. I understand hosting and domain renewal cost money, but no ads please.
- Ant the obvious: hate, crypto and other nonsense sites are not cool.
Future Updates
While building the site I thought I had a fancy design that would work, but I was very wrong. I found so many more sites that I had to omit those for the launch. Am already workimg on a new more scalable design that will include them all the sites!
- New design
- Sort and search
- Generate screenshots
- Add descriptions and maybe categories
- Some sort of automated script that flags dead sites
Got any other ideas for the site or know a cool site not on the list? Add it to the GitHub repo or hit me up on Mastodon.
UPDATE
New design is now live. Originally I planned to go for a table like design but it felt too spreadsheety, so I stuck with the cards. Introduced the most basic colors for new and visited links.
Added a Search/Filter and Sorting option with list.js. Somewhat dated resource but still works great.
Switched from using Tailwind to just handmade CSS. Not going to lie, Tailwind so much faster to develop with, but handmade CSS is much cleaner.
And of course added a ton of single-serving sites to the list!
