Last week I stumbled on this page that someone made in 2009 and never updated. It lists every public toilet in Tokyo with a tiny drawing of the layout and a rating out of 5. The design is straight up plain text on a white background with no images. I spent an hour clicking through it on a Tuesday night and now I want to find more weirdly specific databases like this. Anyone else have a favorite hyper-niche directory they check now and then?
I was at the downtown branch last week picking up a hold and this librarian was griping to a coworker about a website someone submitted. It's basically just a list of every single tree in a specific park in Portland, updated once a year with a photo and a note if it's shedding bark. She said it's the most boring thing she's ever seen and nobody visits it. But honestly, that sounds like exactly the kind of weirdly specific rabbit hole I love. Has anyone else run into a site that's so dull it's almost impressive?
I was skeptical about this cheap scraper I found on a forum for pulling dead links from niche directory sites, but it actually caught 47 broken URLs on my gardening blog in under 10 minutes. It saved me from having to manually click through each page like I did last month for a different project. Has anyone else used one of these tools for cleaning up old link lists?
Three years ago I found a site run by some retired guy in Nebraska cataloging doorknob patents from the 1880s and it turned out to be the only resource that helped me date my whole front porch restoration, now I check it every month.
I found this site called "The World's Most Boring Color" that just shows a single beige square and updates the hex code once a month. Spent 2 hours trying to figure out why my spreadsheet kept crashing when I copied the URL into it - turns out the site buried a hidden "color measurement" function that automates refreshing every 10 seconds. Has anyone else run into a weird site that silently eats your RAM like this?