Explore the abandoned internet in WebUrbEx!

The Internet is Forever, but only for what you care about:

Over its long existence, people have lived online. Each leaving their footprint, art and online interactions behind them. We like to think of the internet as an all-seeing, never-forgetting canvas, but servers eventually go down, hosting fees may one day go unpaid and services mothballed. That which is not archived may one day be lost forever. The art we’ve made, the stories we’ve told, the communities we were once a part of, or lurked in like a fly on the wall. Often, only our memories remain.

Explore the past

In conjunction with several key contributors, WebUrbEx Navigator offers a window back into the before-lost Easy Web Archive (EWA) community that existed between 2000 and 2010. By jury rigging an old browser to allow you to explore this community, we hope we can provide a monument both to EWA and to the many other websites, forums and communities lost over the years.

Contribute to the archive

While our work to document the EWA community is extensive, it is not complete. WebUrbEx Navigator is built to load locally saved sites, so if you have long-lost websites, or feel like making a tribute to the golden age of EWA, you can Load, Share and even Make EWA sites for the rest of the community to explore.

We’ll keep working

The EWA community’s output in its decades-long existence was long and storied and we have a lot to work through. Keep checking back in as we continue our archaeological expedition back into the internet’s wild past. Also, make sure to check out our newsletter on community efforts to unearth long-lost sites.

Good old fashioned shareware

WebUrbEx Navigator will always be available on a pay-what-you-want model. We intend to keep on adding our new discoveries to the archive, and any financial contributions you chuck in will go a great deal towards helping that effort.

Did you Know?

A brief history of the EWA community

Easy Web Archive was a website builder released in april 2000 by J. Morris and Alan “Dale” Dickens with the goal to simplify the process of setting up a good-looking blog. Blogs and Forums running EWA and it’s descendent EWB would be hosted on services such as hansensite and oddblogger before the former shut down in 2009 and the latter in 2015. Some holdout EWB sites remain online even today but the vast majority were lost with those closures. While their impact on the overall story of the internet was small, reading long-abandoned EWB sites on oddblogger was a foundational moment to my teenage years. In 2024 I reached out to Alan Dale with the goal of trying to recover some of the sites lost in the service shutdowns over the years, and he was able to provide an incomplete but extensive archive of the early years of EWA, as well as some of the code needed to get the parser back up and running. While working on this project we’ve been able to get in contact with others who’ve kept backups of sites from later years of the EWA community’s history but recovery is slow going and we hope you’ll be patient with our pace in releasing our findings.