There's a specific feeling the early web had that's hard to name but immediately recognizable when you encounter it pages that felt like someone's actual space rather than a product. Small Victories, built by XXIX studio and launched around 2016, came close to capturing that. The concept was simple: grant the service access to your Dropbox, and the files you dropped into a folder automatically became a website. Noupe No CMS, no deploy pipeline, no server configuration. Just files becoming pages. When Dropbox shut off the API features that Small Victories depended on around 2019, that simplicity largely disappeared from the web.
I'd also been a longtime Are.na user, going back to the early days when it felt genuinely weird and interesting a place for collecting ideas that had more in common with a commonplace book than a social feed. The two tools scratched different itches, but they shared the same underlying disposition: your content lives somewhere you control, and publishing it shouldn't be a project.
tiny.garden is what happens when you combine those two instincts.
The mechanic is straightforward: connect your Are.na account, select a channel, choose a template, and your site is live at a subdomain of tiny.garden within seconds. I built both the frontend and the backend the Are.na API integration, the template rendering pipeline, the subdomain routing with the explicit goal of keeping the output as close to plain HTML and CSS as possible. Sites are pre-built HTML and CSS with no JavaScript and no loading spinners. Just content. tiny That constraint wasn't an accident. It's what gives the sites that early-internet texture pages that load instantly, that you can view source on, that feel like documents rather than applications.
The template set is opinionated but broad enough to cover the kinds of informal publishing that used to be easy and has quietly become hard: a blog, a feed, a presentation, a timeline, a changelog, a document. Things that don't need a full CMS but deserve more than a Google Doc link. Your Are.na channel is the CMS add a block there, rebuild your site, and it's current. The content stays in Are.na regardless; there's no lock-in.
The goal was something that felt honest about what the web used to be good at: giving people a lightweight, expressive, genuinely personal place on the internet without requiring them to become engineers to get there. That spirit is still worth building toward.