The Straight Dope has long been a great website. I believe it was even commended as such in the early days of webbing. But memories are short and getting shorter, and tempus fugitaboutit. These days anything can get lost in the shuffle.
Am looking for good website recommendations. The website must be free to access a lot of desirable content. It may involve your work, a hobby or other interest. It should be an active website you personally use, and while it may be very popular, should not have billions of users.
Best medical research website. Type keywords, get journal articles and often access.
Great used book consolidated site, especially good for cheap penultimate addition textbooks about anything. (The purpose of this thread is not to solicit ads. I use this site every week. Shut this thread down if it becomes a shilling zone.)
A lot of Dopers have Steam accounts. If you don’t like a game’s default library art, this website is a collection of alternate and customized art, in the proper dimensions, for a pretty large number of games that you can download and use instead.
Matrix airfare search (now owned by Google). The most sophisticated airfare search engine. Using “advanced controls” flights can be filtered by an enormous number of factors.
Spiceworks is my one-stop-shop for all IT related questions. You can easily find great technical solutions simply by adding the keyword +Spiceworks to Google searches and then checking the top few Spiceworks results.
It has a very active community of IT professionals who help each other. Their version of karma is called ‘Spice’ and it is awarded for providing technical solutions and helpful answers. You’re not allowed to post questions or contribute unless you actually work in IT but that’s part of why the content is so good. Many of the people who contribute are top-tier professionals who you’d pay big bucks for if you hired them as a consultant.
Much knowledge can be gained from just lurking and searching for answers. Many non-professionals do that to find answers to their tech problems. Forum for IT Pros (spiceworks.com)
KM Weiland’s writing website, Helping Writers Become Authors. A ton of great content full of writing tools and insight into the core concepts of building fiction. Her books are great too.
I reccomend her series on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Really interesting stuff.
I see that your link has loc.gov, do you ever use the read.gov website? It is the Library Of Congress’ website dedicated to getting people to read more. The amount of online material they have access to is amazing, film/video, nonfiction, fiction, artwork, all of it. I go there occasionally for the science fiction short stories.
Weather.gov – the National Weather Service’s web site, with weather conditions and forecasts for pretty much every location in the U.S. Just type in a city name or zip code, and you get details for the desired location: for instance, here’s the detailed forecast for my home town of Green Bay, WI.
It’s ad-free (unlike the Weather Channel’s site), and features straightforward information and forecasts, hour-by-hour condition charts, and detailed “forecast discussions,” which are really analyses, written by the meteorologists at the various NWS regional offices, about conditions in the area, and what is driving the current forecast – those analyses can become a bit technical, but for weather nerds like me, they’re awesome.
Similarly, the National Hurricane Center’s web site (nhc.noaa.gov) provides the same sort of detailed information and analysis for tropical storms and hurricanes, and is an excellent source for tracking the development and progression of those storms.
About 25 years ago, as the Net was just taking off, the Canadian law societies (ie the lawyer regulatory bodies) got concerned that the big law publishing houses would monopolise the internet presence for Canadian legal sources, so that you would have to pay a subscription to access statutes and judicial decisions on-line.
The law societies were very concerned about that, because accès to the law is important for the citizens and ultimately the rule of law.
So the law societies set up CanLII as a free access site, starting with cases and continually expanding. Citizens and lawyers don’t need to pay a subscription to access the law. And the law societies fund free access as part of their commitment to public service, from the annual practice fees paid by every lawyer in Canada.
They’ve recently expanded their coverage to include free access to law journals, responding to the increasing proprietary stranglehold that the law publishers have. (This problem is not unique to law journals; it’s a major concern for university libraries generally).
The free law movement isn’t unique to Canada, of course. There’s LII in the US, BaILII in Britain and Ireland, and others in other countries, but it’s an important step to maintain access to the law.
Straightforward information, without the major news media hype. Weather Underground is good too (it has 10-day forecasts, which the NOAA does not), and is also free.