André

A small guide to Lisbon — blog.delaranja.com ◎ ’06

The old-web version: walking notes, links, photos, food, museums, architecture, comments. The instinct was already there.

A Small Guide to Lisbon — email ○ ’13

A recurring reply to friends and visitors: restaurants, bars, walks, things worth seeing. Not everything. Just enough.

small.guide — the domain ◌ ’19

A name that felt like an object before the project existed. Still being recovered.

smallguide.to — the sentence ◎ ’26

A domain that completes the title: A Small Guide to Kyoto.

Observe deeply ○

A room, a counter, a shelf, a dish, a bottle, a building, a ritual, a person.

Compress without flattening ◎

The work is to make judgment portable without making it generic.

Mark what matters ○

◌ attention. ○ judgment. ◎ gravity.

Remove until it has pressure ◎

The guide earns trust through what it leaves out.

Wine ○

Adegga, notes, regions, bottles, memory. Taste as structure.

Coffee ○

CoffeeSpots, rooms, baristas, cities. Discovery through people, not ratings.

Search ◎

PageRadar, audits, digital reality. Making hidden structure visible.

Cities ◎

Lisbon, Kyoto, Copenhagen, Seville, Venice. Places that age well.

A place enters because it belongs ◎

Not because it is popular. Not because it paid.

A small ad ○

A place can pay to speak, never to belong.

A light site is a form of respect ○

For people, paper, machines, devices, energy, and the web.

Locally literate, visually monolingual ○

The guide should know where it is without becoming noisy.

The internet made finding easy ○

It made trusting harder.

Small Guides is an authored index of judgment ◎

Not a directory. Not a ranking. Not generated abundance.

Start here ○

A Small Guide does not tell you everything. It gives you a first true door.