Ancient Web: The Library of Juggling Archived 174 Tricks With Animations

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Trying to describe a juggling trick in words is an excellent way to discover how many different meanings the phrase "throw the ball over there" can have.

Visit the Library of Juggling.

Ian Convy created this site in early 2012 to gather juggling patterns scattered across personal pages, videos, and discussion boards. The project is younger than most sites in this collection, but its preservation story is unusually clear. It documents tricks that were easy to lose as individual demonstration pages disappeared.

In his account of the site's history, Convy says the idea came from a defunct juggling tutorial site called KingsCascade. He wanted a larger catalog, initially adding lessons as he learned each pattern himself.

A trick is more than its name

Today the Library describes 174 patterns. Each gets an animated example made with JugglingLab, alongside information such as the siteswap notation, a difficulty rating, and prerequisites. Some lessons also break a trick into smaller one-ball and two-ball movements.

The Three Ball Cascade tutorial, for example, explains why beginners should practice throwing accurately between hands before introducing more balls. It shows how a two-ball exchange leads into the three-ball pattern and warns that ordinary tennis balls can turn practice into a floor-level scavenger hunt.

The huge navigation tree progresses through three-, four-, five-, and six-ball patterns. A visitor can move from the Cascade to complicated named tricks such as Rubenstein's Revenge and Rolf's Wave. The site's update log preserves batches of additions from 2014 and 2015.

Convy explains that a wrist injury interrupted his juggling and that the project sat largely unchanged after June 2015. When he returned to improve its hosting in 2023, he rebuilt the site with Jekyll but retained its original arrangement and look. The underlying material also received a public repository.

That history makes this more than a current tutorial site with old-fashioned styling. It is a consciously preserved catalog from a particular period of enthusiast knowledge-sharing, with the creator documenting both its creation and its long pause.

Not every ancient-web survivor needs to be from 1996. Some are valuable because they keep earlier independent knowledge from becoming a broken link.

Start with the Cascade tutorial.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.