Wander Console 0.1.0

Wander 0.1.0 is the first release of Wander, a small, decentralised, self-hosted web console that lets visitors to your website explore interesting websites and pages recommended by a community of independent personal website owners.

Anyone with a personal website can take this tool and host an instance of a Wander console. Each Wander console loads personal websites and pages recommended by the Wander community. Further, each Wander console can link to other Wander consoles, forming a lightweight, decentralised network for browsing the small web of personal websites.

Setting up an instance of a Wander console involves copying just two static files from the Wander project at codeberg.org/susam/wander. The most interesting aspect of the Wander console is that discovery of new links from other consoles happens on the client side in the user's web browser. As a website owner, you do not need to set up any server-side components beyond a basic web server. In fact, you can host a Wander console on GitHub Pages or Codeberg Pages too.

To learn more about Wander, how it works and how to set it up, please read the project README at codeberg.org/susam/wander.

Why do we need something like this? Not everybody is aware of this beautiful portion of the internet, the small web, which is quirky, where we have all kinds of strange websites, where people are expressing their personality, and so on. Of course, I don't think everybody needs to know about the small web. Some people use the web as a utility, and I think it's totally fine for them. But people who are creative on the Web might want to know about the small web, because it's the element of surprise that makes it special. You never know what you will find when you click the button.