about this place

ourplaceof.rest is a small community website. it is run by one person (hi) and a handful of forest critters who have agreed to serve as mascots in exchange for occasional acorns.

why?

because the internet got loud. because every site you visit now is begging for your attention, your time, your engagement, your data. because the feeds never end and the notifications never stop and somewhere along the way the web stopped feeling like a place and started feeling like a job.

this site is an attempt at the opposite. there is no algorithm. there is no infinite scroll. there are no metrics. there is just a homepage, a forum, a guestbook, and a few links. you can read the whole thing in an afternoon and then leave it alone for a month. that is fine. it will be here when you come back.

the mascots

they live in the woods behind the website. you may see them around.

• 
  Rocky the Raccoon — the proprietor. found the domain in a dumpster (where else?), set up the forum himself, hand-rolls every webring submission. trash-panda by night, sysadmin by other-night.
• 
  Mabel the Owl — the librarian. tends the links page and the noticeboard. asks pointed questions in long threads at 2am.
• 
  Pip the Hedgehog — the host of the welcome thread. shy at first, fierce defender of newbies, brings cookies to every meetup that doesn't exist.
• 
  Juniper the Fox — finds the cool stuff. runs the "what we're reading" thread. has opinions about RSS readers and is happy to share them.
• 
  Bram the Mouse — tiny, gentle, mostly lurks. keeps a notebook. occasionally posts a single perfect haiku and vanishes for a week.

technical notes

this site is hand-built. the frontend is static HTML rendered by Astro, served from a small linux container behind a cloudflare tunnel. the forum is phpBB 3.3, because phpBB is timeless and your grandkids will still be running phpBB forums after the LLMs all run out of training data.

the source lives in a git repository. the changelog lives at /news.

contact

the forum is the best place. for everything else, sign the guestbook.