>I've been thinking about making a few webrings that people may find useful.
You should! Even if it's niche and few people will see it, put it out there. Mirror it on a few places, be it your own website, a pastebin that doesn't expire, on textboards. Mirror it to multiple sites so that even if you stop updating it and move on, it can still be out there. It is up to us to preserve things online. As users - every one of us online - is like a librarian or archivist of the past, existing in a new world where we have a technology that would have been unfathomable just a few decades ago.
Information should be free. It was the entire point in the internet. If you have things you enjoy and archive and if you want to share it, do your best to get it out there and ensure it lives as long as it can.
>It's sad when you have a company like goodwill who would rather post stuff that was donated to them online to attempt to maximize profits eliminating the sole purpose of charity for lower price to people who may need it.
It's funny you say that. I worked at Goodwill part time many years ago when I needed some extra money. It was unbelievable how much cool stuff came in. They had a policy that anything of potential value was to be put off to the side so that it could be sold either in the glass display cases at the checkout or on their online auction website.
You know what I did instead? I'd price stuff as cheap as possible and put it on the shelves. Digital cameras that could have sold for 600 dollars? I put a 10 dollar price sticker on it. Old video game consoles? I put a 15 dollar sticker on it. A cool old 486 computer (that may or may not have even worked)? A 5 dollar sticker. A sealed pack of old floppy's? I'd slap a 50 cent sticker on those. Anything cool or retro I said to myself: fuck their auction. I know people want this. Guys like Lazy Game Reviews who scour old thrift stores for neat stuff. Totally unknown dudes who just want to check out what is in the store that day...then happen to find a VIC-20 with an 8 dollar sticker on it. I made sure to give people good deals.
But on the other hand, we'd have a lot of staff that didn't know anything about old products. The way Goodwill and similar stores work is that stuff gets donated (or trucked in from other donation centres) and minimum wage staff look through it for anything of value. There were sooooo many nice electronic products that would just get thrown into the scrap bins that would have been worth a lot of money or more importantly give people some enjoyment. All because you've got some high school kid or a dude with downs syndrome - basically anyone clueless - looking through electronic donations on a certain day and deeming it to all be garbage. They'd think...oh okay a Bluray player, nice. A working lamp, nice. An old yellow'd Amiga 1000? Ah this is older than me, must be useless - then it gets literally thrown into a giant box that gets sent off to get sold for e-waste recycling.
I could write so much more about it, but that sums it up. They get a lot of great stuff often by people clearing out their grandparents basement or dead fathers storage locker, then dumping it all here, not realizing they have some great stuff. Anyway, I did my best to make sure normal shoppers had a chance to get something super retro and neat. Even if it was just a cool old midcentury calculator or lamp. I think they're a bit more strict these days, though, in how they vet donations so they can auction off anything of potential value.