Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.
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A small collection of text-only websites

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A couple of years ago, I started serving my blog posts as plain text. Add .txt to the end of any URl and get a deliciously lo-fi, UTF-8, mono[chrome|space] alternative.

Here's this post in plain text - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites.txt

Obviously a webpage without links is like a fish without a bicycle, but the joy of the web is that there are no gatekeepers. People can try new concepts and, if enough people join in, it becomes normal. I'm not saying the plain-text is the best web experience. But it is an experience. Perfect if you like your browsing fast, simple, and readable. There are no cookie banners, pop-ups, permission prompts, autoplaying videos, or garish colour schemes.

I'm certainly not the first person to do this, so I thought it might be fun to gather a list of websites which you browse in text-only mode. If you know of any more - including your own site - please drop a comment in the box!

If you'd like to add a site, please get in touch. The rules are simple - content which has the MIME type of text/plain. No HTML, no multimedia, no RTF, no XML, no ANSI colour escape sequences.

Emoji are fine though; emoji are cool.

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22 thoughts on “A small collection of text-only websites”

  2. I have a bit of a tangential question.

    When I view this post in my newsreader, I see an image of a cat, but when I follow the link to view the entry on your website, I see no cat. Where is he or she hiding?

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  6. If Markdown (text/markdown) mimetype is allowed, my website is offered in XHTML and Markdown - just substitute the .xhtml in the URLs with .md and get the “source code” view - aligned to 80 character width on a best-effort basis because this is actually how I type in the content for my site 🙂

    I used to use an own plain text data format which was “nicer” to read in the plain text source code (https://masysma.net/32/d5man_legacy.xhtml) but it was too difficult to maintain hence I switched to a Markdown variant understood by pandoc...

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  8. Ah neat, thanks for listing my Website!

    To clarify for my PIM https://fabien.benetou.fr the engine behind it is PmWiki. It means all PmWiki instances that do not block this action (and I bet it's most) can be browsed this way. I took the occasion to add mine to https://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/PmWikiUsers where you can find a lot more.

    So on "a webpage without links is like a fish without a bicycle" and the numerous HN comments on the topic, that highlights that's hypertext is broader than the Web. It is in fact initially text itself linking to more text. One could in terminal curl any of those Websites, parse the specific format for internal links (e.g. [[Group/Page|name]] on PmWiki syntax) then transform to a URL proper. For my own instance it'd be curl https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SwappingPartsOfTheRestrictionStack?action=source | sed "s/\[\[/[[https:\/\/fabien.benetou.fr\//g" | sed "s/]]/?action=source]]/g" and I can then click on URLs via Konsole. I could imagine then forcing it to open again via Konsole (rather than my default browser) and browse the entire... oh well, I'm now re-creating a (extremely minimalist) browser 😉

    FWIW I do believe it's quite beautiful to attempt at being genuinely responsive, namely going "crazy" with e.g. WebXR or datavizs per page (e.g. your Interactive Relationship Graph, I also have something similar using embedded Observable notebook with D3) but also "just" normal 2D non interactive Web all the way to plain text. The audience should be able to browse the way they prefer.

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  10. Terence Eden’s maintaining a list of websites that are presented as, or are wholly or partially available via, plain text. Obviously my own text/plain blog is among them, and is as far as I’m aware the only one to be entirely presented as text/plain.

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  17. Elle announced that she'd created a text-based version of her website; right now it only works via curl but you can access it via e.g. curl elle.sh or curl elle.sh/blog. But it certainly delivers all content via text/plain (so long as your User-Agent is set to something it recognises as a plain-text-preferring user agent!).

    Neither she nor I know whether you think that counts, but I feel like it should (it's certainly more a "text-based website" than one which merely allows some content to be transformed into plain text, IMHO). She's happy for it to be added to the list if you agree!

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  19. 写博客的重点在我看来是「写」本身。技术博客确实 LLM 可以随便生成一大堆，但是自己去写能够对「自己到底有没有搞明白这个技术」这一问题有更好的认知——LLM 生成的内容终究只是让你「消费」了这个知识，到底有没有悟进去，只有自己「产出」的时候才知道。 也有一种说法：只有自己能教明白一个不懂某概念的人去懂，才算完全理解了该概念。所以写技术博客的时候，可以考虑一下将其写成教程一样的文章。 我的博客网站已经被 @Spike-Leung 分享过了：谢谢你分享我的博客 😁 我的网站设计和他分享的其他网站多都带有极简风格，所以我就分享个不咋极简的： https://henry.codes/ 这个很酷，设计很有美感 这一点我也认同。 有些「老古董」的博客网站用的都是浏览器默认的 CSS 样式，也有为了专注于文字、舍弃了 HTTP/HTTPS 协议和 CSS/JavaScript、转而使用 Gemini 协议（可以见我写的 这篇文章），或者提供仅文字的人们（可以见 这篇文章）。重点都是「文字」，文字才是可以支撑起整个博客网站的核心支柱。 我之前也使用过 GitHub ...

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