Buttons

Why don't websites link to each other anymore? And where are all the buttons?

One of the things the search-engine-fication of the web killed off was links.

Not as in, like, links links, but having a part of your personal website where you just… linked to stuff you liked, linked to the websites of your friends, have a blogroll, maybe even be part of a webring—ideas that already seem so lost to time I felt the need to link to their Wikipedia articles.

No one really seems to do that anymore outside of the smallest, most intentionally Web 1.0 of websites, which is a real shame because it was a genuinely useful way of finding people and content similar to what you were already looking at.

An amphimorpho looking alarmed and grimacing.

Algorithms have taken over that job these days, and frankly, they kinda suck at it, and the enshittification of Google has made searching for similar things almost as useless.

A particularly prominent part of this linking behaviour was “buttons”. Websites would often have all sorts of little 88×31 buttons scattered in their footers, sidebars or links pages. Likewise, they would often have their own buttons available for other websites to use when linking back.

These were everywhere, even browser vendors and the W3C made them!

They probably fell out of fashion for good reason. Standard textual links are more accessible, don’t require an extra graphic to display (no matter how small it is), and are usually much less obnoxiously flashy.

But I still have some nostalgia for them. So I made one. Just for funsies.

Who knows, maybe someone will actually use it to link back to here some day?

<a href="https://beeps.website">
  <img
    alt="beeps.website - a site by a plural, furry, otherkin weirdo"
    src="https://beeps.website/assets/images/88x31.gif"
  />
</a>