A fun trend on the "small web" is the use of 88x31 badges that link to friends websites or in webrings. I have a few on my website, and you can browse a ton of small web websites that way.
https://varun.ch (at the bottom of the page)
There's also a couple directories/network graphs https://matdoes.dev/buttons https://eightyeightthirty.one/
A beautiful trend that has been going for 30 years ;-)
One of the happiest moments of my childhood (I'm exagerating) was when my button was placed in that website that I loved to visit everyday. It was one of the best validations I ever received :)
What inspired me to pursue computer related fields was making little badges and forum signatures in Photoshop as a teen. Heartwarming to see this tradition has persisted
I can't be the only one with an ancient collection of artistically-mismatched "under construction" graphics.
my main problem with such links is... how often do you update them? how often do you check those websites to see that they're still active?
I remember going through all the blogs linked on terry tao's blog - out of like 50 there were only 8-ish still alive :(