The Neostumble Project

Background

Picture this: It's 2008. You log into your computer, check your socials and find that no one is on Instant Messaging this early in the morning. The blogs and webcomics you follow haven't been updated today, and your forum posts are caught up on. What do you do with your internet access?

You click the stumble button in your browser toolbar, or you go to the in-frame browser and stumble around the internet.

It was a time of organic web discovery. It was almost like manual crawling. You would make an account, add some interests, and start looking at sites. With every thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or report came a change to the ecosystem.

You could find websites with adorable animal photos, new hacks, fun games, web art, and more. Websites would be submitted with user-defined categories. It was the world of a human-curated web.

The goal of this project is to find a way to do this for the smolweb. How can we bring back this organic discovery?

The Simple Version

At its core, all the NeoStumble project is a list of websites that can be randomly chosen from and users can suggest pages to add.

Effectively, a Javascript button and a CSV file.

The first iteration of the project will be just that. It will be extremely simple.

The Simple Build

For the simplest form of NeoStumble only 3 small components need to be made:

• A Form for submitting new Pages, or reporting existing pages
• A list of pages, in CSV or non-CSV form
• A Javascript button that sends users to a randomly chosen page

This should be straightforward and easy to make.

The Ultimate goal

A more ambitious goal can be found here