Guno has grown in pieces. A search feature here, a community page there, a crawler that needed another round of attention, and an admin tool built when I needed it. Building that way gets ideas onto the web, but eventually those pieces need time and care to fit together.
That has been the focus of this latest round of work: going through Guno as a whole, cleaning up the rough edges, and giving it a more consistent foundation.
Making the website feel like one website
Some pages had lost the Guno logo. Others had managed to collect two of them. Navigation and layouts had drifted as different sections were built, and using the site on a phone could be harder than it should have been.
The public pages now share a consistent header, with a full-screen mobile menu and more attention to keyboard navigation. The homepage is better organized, scrolling problems have been addressed, and layouts have been checked down to narrow phone widths. I also brought Font Awesome icons into the interface and worked through search, browsing, categories, broken navigation, and page metadata.
These are small details individually, but together they make it easier to get around and find something worth reading.
Helping the crawler move beyond familiar ground
One of the most frustrating problems was watching the crawler return to the same few sites instead of finding more of the static web. Repeated visits alone do not make a useful discovery engine.
The crawler now keeps a discovery queue between runs, remembers recently checked URLs, and spreads its attention across different hosts. More discovery sources have been added, and automatic runs are configured twice daily with clear limits on the amount of work each run can do.
I have also made the static-site checks more deliberate. A page looking simple is not enough to settle every case. When the evidence is uncertain, the candidate goes into a review queue rather than being treated as an automatic match. There will still be judgment involved, and I will keep watching how discovery behaves as the queue develops.
If you have a static website you would like me to consider, manual submissions are still a useful way to put it on Guno's radar.
Awards people can be proud to display
The Gunnies deserved artwork that felt like an award. All six designs have now been rebuilt as SVG plaques, with beveled edges, ornamental details, decorative lettering, and a reflective shine. The main tiers use metallic finishes, while the special awards have their own enamel colors.
SVG keeps the artwork sharp at different sizes. When an award is issued, the plaque can show the recipient's name and year, and the site owner can download it or use a responsive embed. Verification links identify the particular award, which matters when different sites share a hosting domain.
You can see the new designs on the awards page.
Making the daily work easier
A website needs tools that make it practical to look after. The admin area has had a substantial overhaul, with clearer navigation, a central review inbox, searchable tools, and dedicated places for settings and system health.
Imports now have a preview step before anything is published. Older duplicate pages point to the current tools, and the catalog, crawler review, backups, and search index work together more carefully. The contact handler and page editor have also been completed. Much of this work is invisible from the homepage, but it helps me spend less time fighting the backend and more time caring for the directory.
A little company news, too
I have updated the creator page to better reflect my work. I am a software engineer and the owner of Hamelton Software and JIJ Web Solutions. Elliot Software has merged with Hamelton Software, and I have added a static site hosting plan at JIJ Web Solutions.
That sits naturally alongside what I am trying to do with Guno: help people make a place of their own on the web and help other people find it.
The reason for all of this
Guno is still about discovering static websites and the people behind them. Personal pages, small projects, collections, experiments, and carefully tended corners of the web deserve a way to be found.
This round of work gives me a better foundation to keep building on. Thank you to everyone who has submitted a site, left a message, or taken the time to explore. Keep making your little corner of the web your own.