Sheldon Brown

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/ https://www.vannattabros.com/dozer.html -- A detail page from the site, not well organized but so much great info about heavy equipment and logging.

Also worth mentioning bicycle related is the lifework of Sheldon Brown: https://www.sheldonbrown.com Not fancy looking, but very interesting.

I think Sheldon Brown's website is another great example.[1] It's a fantastic resource if you're into cycling, and Sheldon made it to Wikipedia with that site[2], which is more than most people with fancy sites can say. Actually, it's probably a better example than Paul Graham, Dan Luu, or Christ Lattner's sites as it shows that not only tech folk will read your basic looking website as long as the content is good. [1]: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Brown_(bicycle_mechanic)

That's a strange flex, but I like it. I had forgotten about Sheldon Brown. He was an excellent author and I learned a whole lot from readin his writing. His site is a great example of what the late 90s/early 00s web was good at doing: https://sheldonbrown.com/

For a deep dive into all things bicycle, I always recommend Sheldon Brown's delightful knowledgebase, which started in the late 90s: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/ (sadly Mr. Brown is no longer with us, but his web archive lives on) And there's always Bicycling Science for the serious nerds among us https://www.amazon.com/Bicycling-Science-Press-Gordon-Wilson/dp/026273…

As a bicyclist, I'm amused this made it on to the HN front page. I'm not sure I agree with the description of stack. Cockpit height can be adjusted with riser stems and different handlebar shapes; it's not solely a function of axle-crown and headtube length. Without getting into it too much, some other descriptions are not great either. The general overview is ok but they make some overly strong claims. I'm not sure I've seen wheelbase used much in a bicycle context, although it makes sense. You see it used for cars a lot. Edit: The go-to source for bicycle information I'd point others at is Sheldon Brown's webpage, https://www.sheldonbrown.com/ .

Another pearl is the Sheldon Brown bicycle repair site: https://www.sheldonbrown.com , the content is so good people maintain it even though he passed away. If you ever want to take a peek at the “man behind curtain” read http://lite.cnn.com/en and compare it to the sensory overload that is their homepage. When you peel back the css and javascript you’ll find there is very little substance. Furthermore, the writing is perhaps on a 5th grade level, maybe lower. Long live excellent content!

https://www.sheldonbrown.com is another great one. His website got him to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Brown_(bicycle_mechanic)

> Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized sites and started producing chronologically organized writings and content. For news or personal diary-format blogs, it makes sense, but I agree. Why did the blog become the default way to present a page on the internet? Aside from serving as an indicator of 'freshness,' publication date usually has no relation to the content I read. It's weird that most content is organized around publication date by default. I like reading old bike websites with stories about touring and such published around the 90s [1][2][3]. Most sites back then had a small section called "News" with short blurbs letting readers know about the status of the author, or new content added to the site, but it was not the main content itself. Content was usually organized in a way that makes sense to humans, rather than feed aggregators and content recommender systems. It's so much better to explore a site by navigation through a few index pages. Ken's site [1] is especially a pleasure to browse. Right on the home page he lists his directories along with straightforward descriptions of what you'll find in them. On a directory page will be a list of pages organized under subheadings, and each one has a brief description. To me, this may be peak internet. It's easy to get a sense of what's there, how to get to the part of it that interests me, and doesn't keep me on a treadmill searching for something I want to read co-mingled with…

Frankly, I don't think this goes far enough: "Ban advertising" would be better. Almost every problem with the internet right now is caused by advertising if you dig through the chain of causality. From social media patterns that addict you to conflict and conspiracy, to popups, adware and spam, to constant attacks on our attention even when we're driving and could literally kill someone with inattention, to spreading dissatisfaction, fear, and poor financial advice, advertising is the root of much evil. And at its core, advertising is just never a good thing, in any context. Proponents of advertising will say, "How do people find out about products and services?" but advertising is an extremely poor answer to that question: there's an inherent conflict of interest when the people selling a product are the primary source of information about the product. In the worst case, this leads to advertisers just lying to consumers and manipulating people's emotion. In the very best case, advertisers present information only about their own product, which doesn't allow consumers to make educated decisions--it's arguably not lying but the effect is the same. You might say, "Why would advertisers be obligated to provide information about competitors?" and you're right, they aren't, but we aren't trying to establish blame or responsibility here, we're trying to find a solution that's good for consumers, and advertising just isn't that. A better solution is independent review sites.…

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/ -- Sheldon Brown (RIP), Bicycle Technical Information http://www.dansmc.com/MC_repaircourse.htm -- Dan's Online Motorcycle Repair Course https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ and https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/ -- AI philosopher Aaron Sloman's ("disorganised") web pages. Brilliant examples of the charming mess that was so easy to create with 1990s plain html'ing. Impossible to navigate, but I still always want to go back, although I know next to nothing about AI. Also, his sub-section titles like "Separate file listing main contents of this site" or "CONTENTS LIST (BELOW)" are hilarious in this context. Oh, okay, this must be the real gem: "APOLOGIES FOR MESS This page badly needs reorganisation My web pages started soon after the internet began, around 1992. Available tools were very primitive for a long time, and later I was too busy to do anything about reorganising the pages. An attempt to get external funding to help reorganise it was unsuccessful. So here it is (above and below), and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here." Gotta love 1992 and prof Sloman's sense of humour!

Cycling is great, I highly recommend it. Don't think of it as a cheap hobby though, once you get into it you are almost guaranteed to start breaking things on a cheap bike and want better gear. As a side note, if you do get a bike on a shoestring budget get an older bike as those things were built to last; modern cheap bikes have gimmicky suspension setups (suspension is great but there are vast differences between cheap elastomers and a plush oil based setup) that don't help and add weight (and parts to go wrong) to the bike. Also if you are finding it difficult to get into, try different styles of cycling. Fast road riding, cross country mountain biking, long distance cycle touring , downhill mountain biking and BMX riding are all vastly different experiences that use completely different skills and muscles. On another note, if you get serious I do highly recommend so called "clipless" (a cleat in the shoe locks into the pedal) pedals for most styles of riding. These things seem so scary and dangerous to start with, but I can virtually guarantee that once you are used to them you will not want to go back even for technical offroad riding. The extra efficiency and control you gain is astonishing, toe clips don't even come close. Of course make sure you practise on a grassy area first and get the feel for them and make sure you are confident with them before heading into traffic. Falling off your bike when you stop for a red light is at best embarrassing and at worst…

throw this onto the wall of fame with https://www.sheldonbrown.com/

another one I loved...I guess still love too https://sheldonbrown.com/fixed-conversion.html

Same feeling here Heavy Kagi user and the idea behind small web was appealing; but how its implemented don't click with me Their rules excludes an absolute gem like https://www.sheldonbrown.com/ which is, to me, the essence of what we could call the "small web". Each times the topic pops up, I try a few random ones and never found anything interesting.

I always loved this quote from here: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/stuck-seatposts.html > To update an old saying, 28 grams of prevention are worth 454 grams of cure.

Every time I’ve visited a Sheldon Brown page, I’ve gone down a rabbit hole. This time it was “Sheldon Brown’s personal bicycles” https://sheldonbrown.com/org/bicycle.html That’s the essence of a great website.

Sheldon Browns website is a treasure trove of information! It’s an old school website, but the content is there. https://www.sheldonbrown.com

That embedded video threw me for a minute. I don’t associate Sheldon Brown with Toyota Tacomas but rather bicycle repair and nerdery. https://www.sheldonbrown.com/

Thanks! I celebrate weird hobby web sites. Here are some of my favorites: * 59828 different definitions of "triangle center" https://faculty.evansville.edu/ck6/encyclopedia/ETC.html * Amazing reference on bezier curves https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/ * Sunbeam radiant toaster http://automaticbeyondbelief.org/ * How to pack geometric shapes inside other shapes https://erich-friedman.github.io/packing/ * Pictures of library cards https://librarycards.tripod.com/id1.html * All about pc fans https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php?title=PC_Fans * Cross sections of candy bars https://scandybars.tumblr.com/ * All kinds of info about bicycles https://www.sheldonbrown.com/ * Every type of plastic used by lego https://bricknerd.com/home/every-type-of-plastic-used-by-lego-5-20-22 * Ian's Shoelace Site https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/

The one on cleaning chains is my (scary) favorite: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/chainclean.html

I recently built my first wheel from scratch. Everything I needed to know was collected on this fantastic page on wheel building https://www.sheldonbrown.com/wheelbuild.html > Learning to build wheels is an important milestone in the education of an apprentice mechanic. A "mechanic" who has not mastered this basic skill cannot be considered to be a fully-qualified professional, and will always feel inferior to those who can list wheelbuilding among their skills.

Another great resource for that is "The Bicycle Wheel" by Jobst Brandt. Oops. I guess it's out of print as copies on Amazon are going for $35 and up. My local library should have a copy as I managed to buy two and IIRC I donated one. Not to take anything away from Sheldon Brown. I've spent plenty of time on his site. And of course Brown has a page about Brandt: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/brandt/

The site is still being updated: > Reports of the demise of this Web site are greatly exaggerated! We at sheldonbrown.com thank Harris Cyclery for its support over the years. Harris Cyclery has closed, but we keep going. Keep visiting the site for new and updated articles, and news about possible new affilations. Also: https://sheldonbrown.com/blog/

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/colorcode.html That's great idea.

Reminds me a bit of Sheldon Brown's bicycle website: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/

Interestingly the bike repair bible that most of the experts defer to, i.e. https://www.sheldonbrown.com/ is written by a man who claims he was strongly influenced by the writings of Bertrand Russell, and he is married to a mathematician and has two children who are both mathematicians. The webpage contains several simple maths formulas for calculating things such as gear ratios.

This was the website that made me fall in love with the World Wide Web and the “old Internet”. In the mid to late nineties, I was big into biking and liked to do my own bike maintenance. I came across Sheldon’s wonderful site (probably via Alta Vista) some time after a friend brought me to an Internet café and introduced me to the web. I still have a folder with all the pages I printed out so I could read it at home. RIP: https://sheldonbrown.com/blog/2022/02/03/its-been-14-years-now/

The information tends to be of lower quality (despite the love). For example, I wanted to know why left and right bicycle pedals are threaded differently. Three youtubers gave reasons that I could tell didn't quite make sense. But Sheldon Brown's website explained it ("precession"). https://www.sheldonbrown.com/pedals.html Looks like he added this detail later - it's easier to increase the quality of information like this with text, than with video. Some people add VO later (jarring); Khan Academy re-does videos (breaking references between, confusingly). Most youtubers don't do either. Videos often have paid product placement, unacknowledged. It's very effective promotion, because it feels grass-roots.

> a lot less range Maybe in the more popular implementations like from Shimano. But there's internal hubs with greater ratio spread than chained: The Rohloff: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/internal-gears.html