I have a few guides/tutorials saved in my drafts. Most of them start with a tangentially related preamble about this subject. I thought it'd be smart to just trim the fat; cut straight to the point for those posts, and share the preamble here separately for those who really care.
I recently started and then promptly gave up on trying to list every single small/independent webring and web directory I could find. Was it worth it? I don't know, but now that I've seen and catalogued so many of them, I wanted to share some observations.