Heya, it’s me again.

About a year ago, I started making my own little directory: all the coffee and bagels I’d tried, in one place.

While I was making it, I found Acuppa, a directory of coffee, matcha, bakes and desserts made in people’s homes. Someone else had caught the same urge to list the food around them.

I ran out of time and dropped mine, but I kept noticing the others. Once you start looking, they’re everywhere. Singapore has a website that lists home bakers. It also has another website that lists home bakers: Homebakers.sg. And if you can’t decide what to eat, there’s JiakSimi.

So I made The Directory Directory: a phone book for the little websites that list local things.

A list you can pick up

You can pick it up, turn it around and flip through it. The hardest part was the page turn. People know how paper moves, so if it’s even slightly off, the illusion breaks. But I didn’t want a realistic book either, because this one is made of websites. So it moves like paper and looks like a screen, thanks to a dither shader.

Listing 22

A home baker near your block. A plumber in Tampines. What a pint costs right now. These questions are too small for most big platforms, so someone who wanted the answer built a website instead.

My coffee and bagel directory would have been listing 22. All 21 in the book got further than I did.

Flip through them at dir.mlkkrt.com, and tell me who I missed.

Talk to you soon~