Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-12-30 12:34:20

A small collection of text-only websites

shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-sma…
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 - shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-sma…

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!

• Terence Eden's blog - add .txt to any URl.
• Daring Fireball - add .text to any URl.
• Zach Flowers - replace .html with .txt.
• Fabien Benetou's PIM - add ?action=source to any URl.
• M0YNG - add .txt to any URl.
• Gwern - add .md to any URl or send an HTTP Accept for Markdown.
• Dan Q's textplain.blog - the entire blog is plain text!
• Matt Hobbs - there is a feed of plaintext which allows you to read recent posts.
• Bananas Playground - add index.txt to any post. Also works with index.md.
• Jorvik Systems - change .html to .md for Markdown.
• Max Glenister's blog - add .txt to any post's URl.
• Philipp Dubach's notes - add .txt to any post's URl.
• Derick Rethans' blog - add .txt to any post's URl.
• Ricardson's blog - add .txt to any post's URl.

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.
#blogging #blogs #text #unicode #utf8

A small collection of text-only websites

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.

^{Terence Eden’s Blog}