The modern Web is full of sites trying desperately to be about everything. Hugh Erle Smith built a page about mushrooms growing on poop.
That is better.
Visit Hugh Smith’s Dung Fungi page
The page is a simple photographic catalog titled Dung Fungi. Smith identifies the fungus, where and when he photographed it, and—critically for this particular branch of natural history—what kind of dung it was growing on.
Horse manure. Cow manure. Moose dung. Deer dung. Elk dung. Dog feces.
There is no algorithm attempting to determine whether you are emotionally prepared for Phycomyces blakesleeanus on dog shit. You clicked Dung Fungi. You knew what business you were getting into.
Field notes disguised as a web page
The value here is not visual sophistication. It is accumulated observation.
Smith’s examples span years and locations. Entries on the page include Panaeolus semiovatus photographed at Fort Bragg in 2001 and 2011 on horse manure; Panaeolus papilionaceus on cow manure; Protostropharia alcis on female moose dung in Alaska in 2011; Coprinopsis nivea on horse and moose dung; and multiple examples of Phycomyces blakesleeanus growing on dog feces.
That structure turns a gallery into a compact field record. Species, substrate, place, year. Four pieces of metadata, repeated consistently, become more useful than a page full of SEO paragraphs explaining that fungi are “fascinating organisms.”
It also illustrates a recurring strength of personal specialist sites: weird subjects do not need permission.
A magazine editor might reasonably ask whether a multi-year photographic archive of coprophilous fungi could support an issue. A social platform would probably bury it unless somebody found a way to make a mushroom on elk dung controversial. A personal website only has to answer one question: does the person maintaining it care enough to put it online?
Smith clearly did.
The page also preserves the visual culture of the scientific hobbyist Web. Thumbnails lead to larger images. The browser is expected to behave like a browser. The visitor is trusted to click around. No carousel hijacks the mouse. No modal asks for an email address before revealing the moose shit.
That matters because natural-history knowledge is often built from many small observations, not a single grand publication. A photograph with a date, location and substrate can remain useful long after the software around it looks ancient.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is full of pages like this: aggressively narrow, deeply personal, and far more interesting than their traffic numbers would ever suggest.
The old Web had room for somebody to spend years documenting mushrooms on animal droppings and publish the evidence for anyone who cared.
That is what a healthy information ecosystem looks like.