About the Blue Pages

Overview

The Blue Pages is the web's premier old web directory, designed to be adapted by many niche communities. Its layout is directly inspired by the Yellow Pages, a telephone directory of local businesses, classified and alphabetically sorted, and usually printed on books (and usually also found online).

The goal of this was to index useful and great websites for a particular topic, with a focus on curation. It also aims to be an useful resource for the old web (also known as Web 1.0), mimicking sites such as Yahoo! in its earliest iteration (in 1994), and dozens of independent site directories by many people but with a twist.

The Blue Pages is an open specification. In fact, I encourage people (except big corpo) to expand and bend the idea to it's will, while maintaining ethics. Check out the specification here.

How does it work?

The Blue Pages works just like your typical site directory. Unlike Google, this doesn't rely on the algorithm for sorting listings, as well as the fact it doesn't have a search box (the latter being more of me having some tech limitations, with me having some bias with using server-side scripting than JavaScript, because of my dumb rant :p). This mainly uses alphabetical sorting similar to classified Yellow Pages, categorized and laid out.

Each category are usually put into the sidebar, for easy access. Mobile users can go and collapse the menu to save screen space. The layout is pretty responsive, with mobile users defaulting into a single layout mode (because of lack of screen real estate.)

To use it, let your fingers scroll the screen (or mouse/touchpad), then find your desired site then click on the highlighted link. Some are linked to their storefront page or in case of Discord servers, the invite page, which might need additional applications to be run or if the content is hosted somewhere else. And you're basically done!

Behind the scenes, the Blue Pages listings work by utilizing git, which allows for code to be modified by everyone while being cheap or free. The source code of this website itself is hosted under BitBucket, mainly to utilize custom subdomains for Projects. You can push changes (with some approval of course) or request a websites. Other listings are curated by myself, or by recommendations of other people outside the git repo.

Guidelines

1. Advertising your site here is allowed, but certain criteria must meet before getting your site listed:

   1. It mustn't promote illegal activities, discrimination, violence or other forms of mistreatment.
      • Piracy is partially allowed however, generally pirated content of media that is currently not being republished or resold by the publisher after 15 years. Anything later is not allowed, but it is generally morally good to pirate content if the publisher haven't sold it in any form possible after 15 years or so in any marketplace online and offline.
   2. I do not allow webpages without acceptable substance, i.e spam links, bogus marketing or others.
      • Satire is generally allowed if it is said so clearly on their homepage or about page.
      • Sites dedicated to memes are an exception, but it must follow the guidelines for satire content.
   3. I don't accept sites that doesn't match the spirit of the old web with some exceptions:
      • Discord servers
      • Subreddits
   4. Using AI is limited. As we aren't certain with the ethics of artificial intelligence, like AI art, listing sites that uses AI as a backend or a selling point is very limited. I don't allow:
      1. AI art websites, as these might conflict with copyright systems.
      2. Deepfake websites as it imposes some ethical implications with personal identity.
      3. AI generated websites that only serves as SEO with no other purpose.

2. Don't use The Blue Pages as a place of useless conflict, as it only serves as a directory.

3. If you found copyrighted content that is not used under fair use, please contact me on Discord or email.

4. Web scrapping is not advised as the listings are also available in the BitBucket repo, deeming to be unnecessary.

5. The Blue Pages is under GPLv3 and CC BY-SA International. Please read these licenses if possible. GPLv3 for the general backend code, CC BY-SA for the content shown.

Enjoying AGR's The Blue Pages

If you enjoy using this, then you are encouraged to share it online! Heck, maybe spread the word in your communities too!

As mentioned, it is an open specification, meaning everyone can use my idea for their communities, as well as also helping me improve the concept, and fleshing out the thing.

The logo can be used too but monetizing it isn't allowed. I however also encourage people to make their own logos too, to show their creativity, as well as to give each Blue Pages it's unique identity, instead of being stuck with the same logo, which can be tiring as time goes on.

And I hope you enjoyed it too! As they said, happy finger walking!