PREVIOUS RANDOM SITES OF THE WEEK

The links below all open in the same window or tab as this page by default. Clicking the star (★) at the end of the entry will open the headline link in a new window or tab instead. This seems to me to be the best way to make it a bit more convenient to visit random sites without closing or losing this page while not making it a surprising or annoying default. Based on my tests so far, the new tab should pop up to the right of the parent tab, and the new window on top of the parent window.

Another thing to draw attention to is that this feature began in 2018, and so some sites have changed a great deal over the past several years. If you want to be sure to get a sense of the version of the site that originally featured on The Moonspeaker, it is worth looking the link up on the wayback machine and dialling back to at least the year of the random site date. This is especially important for multi-author, political projects and their associated blogs, which will inevitably reflect changes in personnel and other outside pressures. With politics also come accusations of various types of malfeasance, which may or may not be well-grounded when made or at the time the site was encountered, so it is all the more important to check the source.

Current | 2008-2014 | 2015-2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025

• Éditions iXe (2025-12-06) : An important french materialist feminist press founded around the same time as spinifex, whose range of key authors include Monique Wittig, Colette Guillaumin, and Nicole-Claude Mathieu. They have also long had online order support, shipping from france, as well as supplier arrangements around the world for people ordering their books through independent bookstores. ★
• The Ballad of the Internet Nutball - Chaining Rhetorical Visions from the Margins of the Margins to the Mainstream in the Xenaverse (2025-11-26) : Contrary to impressions encouraged by recent narratives about the "digital humanities," the "digital dissertation" with a view to accessibility and allowing multiple ways of reading the text and incorporating A/V files is not new. Christine Boese's xenaverse infused example dates back to 1998. The site holds up well, despite reflecting the web standards of its time. The internet archived version from 2004 has better preserved the A/V and has many working internal links. The original TOC window link does not work, but the TOC page exists though, and for readers accessing it via this site, this link will open it in a new window. ★
• Whoosh! (2025-11-16) : The classic fanzine inspired by the television series Xena: Warrior Princess, which produced new issues from 1996 to 2001. There is an astonishing quality and range of writing, and founder-editor Kym Tayborn keeps the site and archive online. Not to be missed, it uses no javascript and provides one of the few correct uses of a frames-based layout. (Yes, it is possible!) ★
• myNoise.net (2025-11-04) : Not many sites with an optional paid subscription land in Random Sites, but Stéphane Pigeon has a well-earned spot here. Without a subscription it is possible to access an excellent range of soundscapes, including a full set of controls to adjust them. A one-time lifetime subscription can be had for as little as US$10, opening access to an already tremendous and growing library of sounds, plus the option to request sound files to use offline. Pigeon's site is privacy-respecting, he does not use tracking or other forms of privacy invasive cookies, and sound generation is done server-side. ★
• Dark Patterns Hall of Shame (2025-11-04) : A brilliant, useful, and alas growing catalogue of ways online businesses and other shysters seek to trick us into purchases we didn't want, difficult to cancel subscriptions, and rampant privacy violations. Check this site first if you have concerns about a vendor you may be considering, or changed behaviour of a site you have already spent money on. Most offendors start behaving properly in a bid to cynically win trust first. ★
• Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum (2025-11-01) : Having encountered a few photographs of symbolics computer keyboards, at last a web search turned up a link to this online museum site. The site presents a range of papers and articles on the history of the now defunct company that sought to establish a steady market for machines designed from the operating system up in lisp and to run lisp code. ★
• Canon Cat (2025-11-01) : Canon gave up on the canon cat almost immediately after selling approximately twenty thousand units, despite it being a successfully realisation of the user interface design by Jef Raskin and a highly efficient machine. It was also among the few genuine "computer appliances" designed not as general purpose for the typical user but specifically for clerical work, but was in fact best suited to professional writers. CanonCat.org includes many pictures missing from this site, now viewable only via the internet archive. Readers may also be interested in reading some of the materials on the now fossilized stanford-based site Maing the Macintosh. ★
• Celeste West - Rollicking Spirit and Free Wheeling Change Agent (2025-10-19) : A slowly building website maintained by Tona Perricone, trustee of the Celeste West Trust, which provides an overview of West's work and biography, plus relevant external links. West was part of the remarkable circle of lesbians including poet Elsa Gidlow. Perricone's brief reflections on West's books are wonderful and on point. ★
• The Black Bibliography project (2025-10-19) : Another great project in which scholars and volunteers identify and document books by black authors in the united states. They are especially focussed on early publications, and are seeking to explain how to reframe bibliographic and cataloguing processes to remove systemic practices that block recording of black authors. ★
• Source Memory (2025-10-04) : Now that Max Dashu's extraordinary archive and research project Suppressed Histories is a non-profit, her videos, talks, and books are gathered on this site. Dashu continues to book talks and provide A/V items, and has begun to work on a podcast at intervals. ★
• Hegel.net (2025-09-05) : A site intended as a sort of central resource for people seeking to study Hegel's philosophy. There is a great deal of material including transcriptions, mirrors of materials from the marxist internet archive, as well as some definitely new and unique material in the form of diagrams, a biography, and summaries. Its pdf collection is especially helpful. ★
• datagubbe (2025-08-30) : Carl Svensson's site may be "one of the grumpiest on the web" (as he writes with tongue firmly planted in cheek), but it is also one of the best javascript and generally spyware free sites discussing the web, software, and computers. He is opinionated, of course, while crucially respecting the reader, which is all too rare these days. ★
• loriemerson (2025-08-02) : English literature and media studies professor and now also a serious hands-on builder of network electronics and an amateur radio operator, Lori Emerson is also founder of the media archaeology lab and an important constructive critic of the internet. She is researching an ongoing series of articles on networks before the internet, producing several websites and a busy blog. ★
• Wellcome Collection (2025-07-20) : A remarkable set of digital collections, sometimes near overwhelmed by violent virtue signalling, from the free museum in london, england that opened in 2007. The topic focus is "health" which, and here is a warning, valorizes in vitro fertilization. (It is literally a front page item for both the museum and the wellcome foundation itself, which was founded from a rich man's fortune and is now a clever tax avoidance vehicle.) ★
• Mexicolore (2025-07-18) : A remarkable site founded in 1980 by Graciela Sánchez and Ian Mursell as a major learning and teaching research about culture and history in Mexico. The many articles under the Maya and Aztec subsections are written for a junior high audience while properly citing a range of excellent sources. ★
• Cité de Compositrices (2025-07-13) : An impressive project that began as a youtube series introducing listeners to compositions by french women composers whose work had not been published or had otherwise been left out of the performing repertoire despite it being more than good enough to share. Initiated by Héloïse Luzzati, that series has now grown into an ongoing research, publishing, and record label project. ★
• BackLit on Neocities (2025-07-07) : Bob Leggitt's important site providing excellent long reads on the state of the web, the challenges for those of us seeking to maintain genuine online security and privacy, with admirable plain language and evident commitment to helping put a stop to the nonsense, which he does realize is an outcome of capitalism. Do expect to read various apparently sacred oxen getting gored, and enjoy the breath of fresh air created by his commitment to ensuring his site is entirely workable without javascript. Leggitt also has older posts up (for now) on blogspot. ★
• (Seligman's) Celestial Atlas (2025-06-19) : Courtney Seligman's project consists of an effort to update existing celestial catalogues, adding missed or mislabelled objects of interest. It includes versions of the Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies and de Vaucouleur's Atas of Galaxies with newer images. The project is part of Seligman's larger site, which includes his mainstream online astronomy textbook. ★
• Historical Roots and Legacy of the Enlightenment (2025-06-18) : Lee F. Greer's website presenting an impressive amount of research and argument as to how the intellectual movement in europe known as the enlightenment was fuelled by outside influence and how it continues to influence the present. Greer's layout and approach is reminiscent of Jeremy Norman's History of Information project, though by contrast he uses no scripting. Readers less familiar with this material and looking to read David Graeber and Deavid Wengrow's 2021 book The Dawn of Everything would be well served by reading over the home page of this site first. ★
• Lesbian Poetry Archive (2025-06-18) : An ongoing project founded by poet and academic Julie R. Enszer. There is more than just poetry on the site, including bibliographies and periodical listings as well. Many classic lesbian poetry books are out of print, and Enszer has made some of them available again as scans. The only quibble with the site is that it's a bit tricky to navigate, but theh difficulty can be overcome by using the main section links in the upper right of each page. ★
• Beorn's Beehive (2025-06-15) : An intriguing and longrunning blog that began life as a tripod general site of an anonymous norwegian social scientist and computer programmer. Today it provides an important source of articles and references to information on the historical and current happenings in the present day russian federation and the ukraine, as well as the soviet union and earlier, tracing back to "kievan rus." ★
• Progress in Physics (2025-06-12) : One of the first open access, contributor funded, peer-reviewed physics journals online. Part of its purpose was to overcome the growing problem of denial of publication to authors whose work challenged or otherwise contradicted the big band hypothesis and other generally accepted but not necessarily confirmed theories, regardless of the quality of their data and analyses. This site and its mirror remain accessible via the Internet Archive. ★
• Apeiron - Studies in Infinite Nature (2025-06-12) : The journal founded by Halton Arp in 1987, and continued after his passing n 2013 until 2018. It focused on cosmology and the physical and mathematical relationships between Einstein's equations and fundamental equations identified earlier in the history of the discipline. To this day, the goal of the integration of the equations of the very small and the very large and the goal of somehow describing all the fundamental physical forces in one theory and set of equations remains elusive. Luckily its archives and final issue remain accessible on the Internet Archive. ★
• Halton C. Arp Official Website (2025-06-12) : Brilliant observational astronomer and determined analyst and publicist of anomalous data challenging the big bang hypothesis, Arp passed away in 2013 after a storied career. Besides many papers he wrote two excellent books about the data and his experiences striving to share his research so that it could be fairly discussed and tested by his peers. Today's so-called cancel culture and the beginnings of an insidious brain drain from the united states go back much further than many people realize. ★
• Caltech Online Version of Arp's Catalog of Peculiar Galaxies (2025-06-12) : A rare frame-based website that makes excellent use of the format, this site helps maintain the accessibility of Arp's famous atlas, originally published as a special journal issue. It is possible to purchase a hard copy version, courtesy of a reprint overseen by Jeff Kanipe and Dennis Webb and produced by Willman-Bell. ★
• Arp's Catalog of Peculiar Galaxies, An Exploration For Observers Compiled By Observers (2025-06-12) : A site founded and written up by Dennis Webb to support amateur astronomers seeking to view and photograph the unusual galaxies analyzed by Halton Arp in his famous atlas. It includes photographs and data gathered by the amateur astronomers, plus important references and newer photographs from more recently set up telescopes. ★
• Crimes committed by the Nazis and their accomplices against the civilian population of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 (2025-05-25) : This russian language site provides numerous brief papers and transcribed accounts, as well as access to an important archive of digitized documents, a portion of which have only been declassified over the past ten to fifteen years. More importantly, it includes a memorial book full of stories provided by families who lost loved ones during the vicious nazi attack codenamed operation barbarossa. Russian Archives must still have the site up, but I have not yet found its new url, so this link is to the latest archived version. ★
• A Summary of the ISO EBNF Notation (2025-05-03) : For anyone who has not taken a formal computer science class of the original kind where you actually learn how computers wrk and how to program, it can be a bit of a challenge to figure out computer code syntax descriptions. The descriptions aren't complicated, but it is necessary to know how each command, its options, and its required elements are annotated. This site provides a link to the standardized version of the notation, which is now called Extended Backus-Naur Form. ★
• SS64.com (2025-05-03) : Simon Sheppard's excellent reference guide to all manner of command line tools on multiple systems, especially POSIX compliant ones (*nix, macos). Since systems are always changing sections and command listings can fall out of date, but this is remarkably rare despite the range of information covered. The site is also hand-coded and designed for accessibility with any browser. ★
• Groklaw (2025-05-03) : It appears that the genuine site is now gone, so the best glance at it anyone can safely get now is at the internet archive, which is the link now provided here. As the founders note, the blog did not provide legal advice, but it did provide important coverage of legal matters related to computers and software. It really has not been replaced since it effectively froze on its last post on the Lavabit owner's comments about email dated 20 august 2013. UPDATE: The apparently "current" version of groklaw is now poisoned, so best to stick to the very incomplete archived versions. ★
• radfem HUB, a Radical Feminist Collective Blog (2025-04-25) : Signal boosting this site as it is a precarious "free" wordpress hosted site. A number of links and crosslinks are to now lost sites and pages, so it is important to check the wayback machine as well. Checking the archive of the blog does not guarantee a page or article will be captured in the snapshot or that other sites are necessarily public, as some have switched to private access. ★
• Ann Lewis Women's Suffrage Collection (2025-04-18) : A slowly growing digital version of a privately owned collection of memorabilia ranging from pamphlets to playing cards. It is far from a new thing for feminists to apply their skills in arts, trades, and crafts to produce materials for fundraising and information sharing. ★
• Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986 (2025-04-18) : An excellent electronic archive of the materials and publications gathered and published by the former chicago-based revolutionary group. It looks to be an ongoing work in progress brought to life by Michael Staudenmaier's history of the orgamization published in 2012 with AKPress. ★
• the media co-op (2025-04-06) : Over a decade ago, one of the better grassroots, genuine left wing newspapers on and offline was the dominion, which went apparently silent 2016. As it turns out, it had not vanished, but the media co-op had needed a time out to re-organize, set up a new website, and build up a new team of contributors and members. They have succeeded and are hard at work covering important items, from the ongoing effort to get cops out of schools to book reviews and policy analysis. ★
• Lynne Kelly (2025-03-27) : A scholar of memory and knowledge systems across history and cultures, a developer of versions of memory techniques for middle schoolers and older, memory athlete, Kelly has a remarkable story of her own. A model of a scholar who studies by experimenting and who is humble enough to talk about what she didn't know and what she learned with grace and humour, her books and her website alike are a treat to read. ★
• rat haus reality, ratical branch (2025-03-25) : Originally founded in 1995, the rat haus is among the oldest still actively developed websites out there. The proprietors favour html, ascii, and pdf formats, and seek to provide access to many information and documents that challenge many mainstream narratives. The topics and materials are incredibly diverse, and it is well worth following any of the threads or indexes to learn and to shake mental cobwebs. Overall, an important aspect of what makes this site special is its position that while humanity is in trouble, it is certainly possible to do something constructive about it. ★
• Hood Communist (2025-03-24) : An important blog founded and edited by a collective of african organizers, scholars, and writers with an internationalist, marxism-informed perspective. They set out their positions up front and publish challenging articles for an independent source of analysis and news on matters affecting africans around the world ★
• Susan Rosenthal - Socialism is the Best Medicine (2025-03-23) : A medical doctor of 50 years experience, Rosenthal eviscerates the claim that there are "social determinants of health" when under capitalism the whole point is to cause profitable sickness. Besides her moderately busy blog, Rosenthal has several important books in print and a series of pamphlets dealing with important information on organizing as well as Marxism, and "medicine" under capitalist conditions. ★
• 6502.org (2025-03-22) : Even if you don't work on software or hardware projects that use 6502 microprocessors, there is all manner of great things to read and examine on this site. This includes important scanned archives of documents, newsletters, and magazines related to but not exclusively about the 6502 family. If you have ever heard vaguely of Dr. Dobbs's Journal, it's a great place to start. ★
• Palestinian Museum Digital Archive (2025-03-21) : An incredibly brilliant project providing digital archives in arabic and english to people in and outside of Palestine, contributing to their protection from confiscation and destruction. For those misinformed as to the actual history and material culture of Palestinians, this archive is an important place to start learning. ★
• Disciplined Minds (2025-03-21) : This is the remaining footprint on the regular internet of Jeff Schmidt's book Disciplined Minds, an important critique and exposé of how the united states in particular trains and controls its professional managerial class. There are indeed broken links, but as the front page notes, the history and deeper layers of the site are readily accessible on the internet archive by looking up disciplinedminds.com in the wayback machine. ★
• Nepenthes (2025-03-21) : Not a site in the traditional sense, but the source and information on the critically important software package for clogging and poisoning exploitative and bluntly resource abusive large language model crawlers. These have recently been taking down larger sites providing research and translation tools for extended periods in what amount to DDOS attacks. ★
• History of Information (2025-03-20) : Jeremy Norman's massive, longterm project documenting ways information is defined, stored and shared in human societies. His focus is on timelines and topic maps, and providing means to browse them via exploring interlinked items, but don't miss his essays, which are numerous and well-written. He notes up front his preference for referencing wikipedia and the new york times, which savvy readers will need to consider when examining more politically sensitive items. ★
• Abahlali baseMjondolo (2025-02-19) : "The Residents of the Shacks," a key and powerful movement of the poor and working class south africans forced to live in slums because of the continued honouring of apartheid land theft policies. If you want to read a full and detailed explanation of current politics in south africa and ongoing colonial attempts to reassert apartheid, this site is an excellent place to start. ★
• (divorcing) White Supremacy Culture (2025-02-15) : By now many of us have likely encountered a version or extracts from Tema Okun's famous 1999 paper on white supremacy culture. Unfortunately, both extracts and a partially outdated paper are not exactly helpful. Okun provides an updated version of the paper and ready access to material to place and keep the paper and its recommendations in context and framed as tools rather than weapons. ★
• SJG Archive (2025-02-14) : This wonderful archive of Stephen Jay Gould's work was an official project implemented in cooperation with his family and the new york-based non profit art and science research laboratory. This archival site honours Gould in part because he founded the organization, but seems to have gone offline sometime after 2016. The capture in the wayback machine is at least complete in terms of the biographical and bibliographic information. For more snippets of his work, besides the Internet Archive itself, there is an unofficial, also archived site, The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive. ★
• History for Atheists (2025-02-08) : Contrary to what we are encouraged to think, writing solid interpretations of historical events is hard, and producing quality secondary literature while avoiding the temptations of cherrypicking all the harder for the impatient and inexperienced. Tim O'Neill's blog and podcast delves into many examples of at best pseudo-historical claims from what he refers to as "neo-atheists" and similar who want to debunk religion. As he notes up front, he is an atheist himself and is not interested in apologetics, his point is to insist on the importance of treating history with honesty and accuracy at all times. ★
• Partnerism (2025-02-06) : For those who prefer to delve into Riane Eisler's work from the broader framework and developed concept of how partnership societies work, worked in the past, and could work in the future in the form of an "ism," this multimedia site serves as an entry portal. It provides a broad introduction, presuming no familiarity with Eisler's books or other technical training in such areas as political economy or history. ★
• Center for Partnership Systems (2025-02-06) : This organization founded by Rianne Eisler helps provide and coordinate tools and training to support cultural shifts in current patriarchal systems with their ingrained death drives into partnership systems without oppression of either sex and a drive towards balanced life. The site already includes many podcasts and an online learning centre. Resources range from the practical to the scholarly, including materials for activists, citizens, and parents. ★
• Riane Eisler (2025-02-06) : If perchance you have not read Eisler's breakout book, The Chalice and the Blade, not only is it still in print, it is available in multiple languages and more relevant than ever. Her website describes her first as a social systems scientist, then as a futurist among other things, and to date the only person describable as a futurist who has practical analyses and proposals, as well as hands on work to help them happen. ★
• Βικιθήκη (2025-02-05) : If you are trying to find a greek text in bibliotheca augustana and having trouble tracking down a specific item, this site is the alternative to use. Βικιθήκη incudes texts from all eras of greek, several more linked tables of contents, and a search engine. This is particularly helpful for tracing ancient proverbs back to the collection they were cited from. ★
• LSJ - Ancient Greek dictionaries (2025-01-30) : A brilliant project based on first wiki-fying the Perseus online version of the (in)famous LSJ, taking full advantage of the affordances provided by hypertexts. Besides correcting unfortunate typos, accent flubs, and replacing latin bowdlerizations with idiomatic language translations, there are new translations and abbreviations can be hovered over to see their expansion. The project has been adding lemmas from other modern languages so that it is useful to more than the originally imagined english audience of the LSJ and working on an improved reverse word look up. All round, deeply impressive. ★
• Herculaneum Society (2025-01-29) : Herculaneum is the somewhat less well-known other city covered by the eruption of mount vesuvius besides pompeii. Unlike pompeii, it was a place favoured by the rich for their homes from home, and it is encased by a mudflow rather than ash. Hence it is both very rich in finds and very difficult to excavate. The society's website is the major english language source for references and news about the site. For a solid italian language starting place, see Parco Archeologico Ercolano (the site server is having intermittent issues, but luckily the internet archive can oblige with a recent capture). ★
• Fallacy Files (2025-01-06) : Source of the semi-famous Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies (partial, complete), composed and coded online by philosopher Gary N. Curtis. Each fallacy links to a definition and example to illustrate it, and the site as a whole includes lessons in logical thinking. An intriguing metaquestion a site like this raises is whether documenting and deeply understanding logical fallacies can help counter politically motivated false claims. ★
• Silva Rhetoricae (2025-01-06) : A widely respected and used manual of classical and renaissance rhetorical terms created and maintained by Gideon Burton, an english professor at brigham young university. It also includes timelines and excellent source lists with links. His interest in the "digital humanities" continues, including more recent books and a foray into crowdfunding to publish them. This site is done without javascript and makes excellent use of frames, so much so website designers should study it. ★