ratfactor

ratfactor is the long-running personal homepage of Dave Gauer, a programmer and maker who has kept the site going since before Google existed. It is a genuinely personal publishing space rather than a product or service, and everything on it, including writing, images, and programs, is made by one human being.

The site collects an unusual mix of material: art and cardboard projects, book and cheese reviews, a notebook system, assembly programming nights, Forth pages, and Meow5, a concatenative language experiment. There are also code repositories, the RetroV virtual DOM library, notes on OpenBSD, Slackware, and Arch Linux, and reviews of computer science papers.

Because the site is large and idiosyncratic, the homepage recommends starting from topic links instead of scrolling the full chronology. A virtual box of cards offers another browsing path, and an RSS feed is available for following updates. Privacy is a stated priority: no tracking, no cookies, no data collection, and JavaScript only where it does something specific and visible.

Readers who enjoy personal blogs, retro computing, low-level programming, and handmade projects will find plenty to explore. The best approach is to pick a topic that interests you, such as the Forth pages or the paper reviews, and follow links from there rather than trying to read everything in order.