Strapping on Web Side Cars from the Small Web: human.json and wander

Among the best reasons to own your own domain and host a web site is to be able experiment, acts that are verboten on your easy, slick, hosted spiffy site. I will take tinker-ability over ease any minute of the day.

If you are unaware of the Small Web, maybe just stay that way. You can look it up and have some GenAI powerd tool with a dude’s name summarize what it is. But for me, it is the still audible faintly rippling echo of the original dream of the web, barely discernable to most subsumed to enpoopified platformatization or cocooned in Zuzkerburgerspaces.

For me, the existence is the pulse in the Fediverse under the #SmallWeb hashtag Note that hashtags are not quite evenly distributed, and are best served from your own instances url appended by /tags/smallweb — maybe one day it will flow from @smallweb.

Following that tag and maybe Kagi’s own small web stream serves me stuff often worth digging into, web things built of the basic elements of the web istself, sitting on the fringe, ones built by individual people, shared for the sake of just sharing.

The web that exists and works quite fine as an undercurrent, and one that we can avoid netstalgic warbling.

Here I share two what I am calling web side cars, almost miniscule files of html, javascript, maybe json that I have hung on the side of my website it is own tiny space. You can do this stuff if you are able to actually upload files to your own server, and it might (gasp) involve editing some text data files that weight like a whopping 5k.

They will not get you a job or fix the politics or get you likes… but I just found them interesting, especially as you can actual add them without having to grunt or groan or npm or however the usual server command line mumbo jumbo dance goes.

I am Human and here is my json

I actually do not worry too much that anyone really thinks I am not human, I assert my frequent and often not edited typos, or my grammatical torques make it freaking obvious. I just fixed my Memorial Stadium post noticing in the opening sentence I typed “sorts” rather than “sports”. Amd my Mastodon profile @cogdog makes its own assertion:

I typo [often] therefore I am [human].

Ha ha.

I came across a week or so ago the human.json protocol by Beto Dealmeida “a lightweight protocol for humans to assert authorship of their site content and vouch for the humanity of others. It uses URL ownership as identity, and trust propagates through a crawlable web of vouches between sites.”

You can read the info yourself, right?

Essentially you create a tiny text file in json format (do not run away screaming) that include the URL for your own humanly created site, for me cogdogblog.com and optionally an array of other people’s web sites that you can “vouch” for as being humanly made. Here’s mine I did quickly as a test:
{
  "version": "0.1.1",
  "url": "https://cogdogblog.com",
  "vouches": [
    {
      "url": "https://darcynorman.net/",
      "vouched_at": "2026-03-20"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://dougbelshaw.com/",
      "vouched_at": "2026-03-22"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://dougiamas.com/",
      "vouched_at": "2026-03-22"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://bionicteaching.com/",
      "vouched_at": "2026-03-22"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://downes.ca/",
      "vouched_at": "2026-03-22"
    }
  ]
}

I uploaded to the root of my ReclaimHosting hosted server (plug for Reclaim, the best hosts in the webiverse). Now the more tricky part is you have to get in the <head> part of your web sites template, one line of a meta that points to it’s location.

Since I know a bit about WordPress themes, I edited header.php in the child theme for my site. I probably lost most of you there. It depends on how your site is run. I added this line as mine is at the top of my domain

<link rel="human-json" href="/human.json">

What happens?

Not much.

The fun comes when you install the Chrome or Firefox extension. For any site running its own human.json, the extension lights up green. For mine, it works on any URL under the cogdogblog.com banner.

Human.json can state the cogdogblog.com is trusted to be made by a typo prone human who also vouches for a few other blogs.

If I visit a site that has been vouched for by me or anyone else using human.json, like https://darcynorman.net/ it lights up green for being vouched, and shows a chain of “vouchification”

D’Arcy Norman’s web site is definitely human made, I can vouch for that even though he talks a lot to that Claude dude.

Of course someone will pipe in already, “GenAI can just spoof this.” Of course it can, but that’s not the point to just pee on all the parades like that.

Will it create a vast web of trust? Doubtfully. Will many people bother? likely not. Will it solve all the problems of AI sloppification? Nope. But it’s interesting.

It carries both the act that an individual can do by tossing a single tiny file on their web server but also the pay it forward effect by vouching for other people.

I am human and I have the json blue light special to show it. It’s an action I can take.

Wandering the Small Web

Wander is just a beautiful concept, something that sends warm ripples down the spine when just using it. It’s a randomly served console that delivers a stream of other small web sites. Maybe without even trying to explain it you can read the info and explore the demo made by its creator.

Or heck, launch mine https://cogdogblog.com/wander/ Each time you click wander, another site loads (some don’t always work, some CORS web thing, just wander on). I just found this wild home page in my console:

From my console at https://cogdogblog.com/wander/ comes a delightful personal site, but hey it is not time to call Laurel

If the site grabs your attention, open it. If not keep wandering. If you click the Console buttont, you get the info about the one in view (mine), plus as you can see the most recent wandered site and the indication that it came from someone else’s console.

The neighbors button displays the other consoles mine recommends (which you cna edit). The Pages button lists the sites I have loaded as recommendations. And what’s neat also is it saves a history of your current wander session in case you lost track of something.

Again, maybe this has not Major Use That Will Increase Productivity or Save Time (the result may be the opposite) but it is a delightful way to navigate a constellation of other sites that are recommended by others who host a wander.

And the whole thing is one director with an index.html file for the console display, and single Javascript site you edit to include the pages to show and a list of other consoles to be connected to yours. It’s dead simple to set up, see the instructions.

Just Attached the Side Cars

I really just quickly added these two mini small web “things” to my own domain. I barely scratched the surface. But I find the freshness and human spirit of thise stand alone web tools just a delight. I have lots of room to strap on more side cars.

This is the web I came for. And stick around for.

Featured Image: Indian parcel courier on Royal Enfield motorbike, Sydney, c.1933 flickr photo by State Library of NSW shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) with a little bit of remix by me to change the text on the car. There was all kinds of side car images in the flickr commons and I remain flabbergasted seeing nearly everyone else reaching for those same same same GenAI cartoon extrusions.