Category: internet culture

Banning the TikToks…

This article from starbreaker.org came across my radar today. It expresses what I think about the TikTok ban pretty completely. Now it looks like Trumpistan may try turn it into some form of state media. How fitting.

I’ve never used TikTok. As soon as someone showed it to me and I saw videos of teenagers dancing I formed a negative opinion of it, because I can be a dick that way.

The  ability to create your own website is what democratizes the internet. The ability to run your own email list, using your own software democratizes it, just like owning your own data and creative output that you can move around and shield from AI thieves (as best you can) democratizes the web.

What would REALLY democratize it would be the ability to fully and completely OWN your own domain name, rather than renting it. But that’s how it works.

I’ve read opinions that having your own site should be easier. I don’t really believe this. It is already just so easy. It’s easier than it’s ever been. What is missing is the awareness in the general population that it’s possible. Awareness and desire. Not everyone wants to have a website. They just want to share stuff. The Fediverse answers that need quite well, but it requires a tiny amount of effort to understand. Tiny. Frankly the ability to text a group of friends and include an image or short video pretty much covers the sharing part as well.

But there is nothing like having your own domain name and website. Or even just a page. Hosted on space that YOU rent or own. Nice and portable. Make yours site such that if one host closes are begins to suck you can just move it. Easy.

Problem solved. You’re welcome, America.

The Beauty of the Hyperlink

As I delve further into the movement back to personal webpages and blogs as the basis for the real internet, one thing that has become very clear is that you must use hyperlinks whenever you can!

The beauty of the web, and really its original intention, was the linking of one document to others, creating – GASP – a web of information and links!

It honestly feels absurd to be explaining this, even if hardly anyone is reading. This is such basic knowledge, but I’m sure that if you ask almost anyone who wasn’t in tech back at the beginning, a serious computer hobbyist, or a librarian, they won’t know why it’s called the World Wide Web.

Social media at best barely permits good linking habits, and at worst makes it impossible, since the owners of the silos don’t want you to leave. To them it is critically important that you stay on their site. This fact has gone a long way toward ruining the internet, but not quite! The old internet is still there, the old ways are easier than ever to learn and do.

Anyway, on this blog, when not simply composing some irrational screed, I try to hyperlink to relevant pages. I tend to link to Wikipedia a lot. When I heard that Musk apparently said bad things or some other shit about Wikipedia the other day I donated for the first time. Hey, I’m a reference librarian approaching my 30th year in the profession so I understand the limitations and problems of Wikipedia, but it’s pretty useful if you are just needing info on the first Godzilla movie you ever saw or something.

Here’s the thing. It isn’t a web if there are no connections. Linking to other interesting sites, pages, or whatever is what makes the World Wide Web a web. So LINK!!!!!!

Manifesto?

OK, I know it seems like I’m going off the deep end, and I may be, but I updated my “About” page. It’s not quite a manifesto – YET. I’m working on it.

I added my static skate clips site, which I generate with Jekyll, to the navigation menu up top. I don’t now if I’ll stick with Jekyll, but so far it is working. There are a few issues I want to work out, but I do love the art gallery look of it.

Honestly, if I can get the issues worked out with Jekyll, or find another static site generator that solves those few problems, I may work on moving this entire blog to a similar setup. WordPress has been good for many years, but it is becoming bloated. I feel like the complexity of the mySQL/PHP stuff makes it vulnerable to hacking. I mean, I know this is the case. Worst, the themes in WordPress are becoming very hard to customize, absurdly complex, and almost all of them suck. The complexity issue means it is really not a great use of my time to create my own.

I do love using micro.blog for my other skateboarding blog. It is based on Hugo, another static site generator. Micro.blog is really a pretty amazing blogging platform. Still, I’m increasingly drawn to building everything I need myself. The transition will take time though. I have lots of other things I’m working on. I think ActivityPub is very cool, but really, I’m getting to the point I’d rather just have people follow the site by RSS and email me if they have something to say. I’m feeling less need to share it everywhere.

I’d hand-code everything and use SSIs IF I could easily create an RSS feed for it. I’m just not there.

 

The Internet is Amazing

I’ve been reading a lot recently about how shitty social media has made the internet. I agree. What started out as promising has really turned to crap. At the same time, I’ve been very immersed lately in learning about the IndieWeb, the “small web”, and such.

For a “normal person” — someone who wasn’t in the tech or academic realm until 1994 — I feel like I was a pretty early adopter of the internet and web. I detail my introduction to the internet and the World Wide Web in this post on my other blog, Me and the Internet, Part 1. (Yes, my blogging has been kind of divided for the last year or two. Been blogging over at micro.blog because I like the platform a lot and it is very interesting.)

I’ll get around to writing part 2 soon enough, detailing the years from 1999 to 2010 when I ran the first skateboard trick archive with video. A site called Bob’s Trick Tips, which got 40,000 page views a day and nearly blew up my credit card with pre-cheap bandwidth/pre-YouTube bandwidth charges.

My point, I suppose, is that since 1994 there has never been a time when I didn’t have at least one personal website. Until I discovered Moveable Type and then WordPress they were for the most part hand-coded (except for running phpBB message forums and trying out a few content management systems).

Further, my point is that I’ve been creating websites and using the web for so long I think that until tonight I had really forgotten how amazing it is and how amazing it can be. When I started on the internet, the browser that came on the floppy the university gave me was Mosaic. There were hardly any sites compared to today. I used Gopher and Telnet to connect to servers all over the country and the globe. It felt fucking incredible. I mean – INCREDIBLE. From our crappy apartment off the drag by UT Austin, with our 28.8 modem and our new Macintosh Performa computer we’d taken out a loan to buy, we could connect with people a world away. It was quite literally William Gibson shit (I’d just read the Sprawl Trilogy).

For the full story, read that post I linked to earlier on the other blog.

Tonight I got an email from Matthew, who runs the starbreaker.org blog and site. We’ve been corresponding a bit. He mentioned that he loves building static sites, just him and a text editor and pushing that stuff up to a server pointed at the internet. That is power. And man, he struck a chord with me. I’ve been thinking so much about how fucking punk rock blogging and/or personal sites are. In fact, I wrote this thing about it recently. But Matthew’s words were simple and powerful. Yes – with a computer, a simple text editor, an FTP client (or maybe just some browser-based upload setup), and some storage space on a server, YOU can publish stuff that can be seen all over of the world. THE WORLD. That is a damned low barrier to entry, because truth is you could go to the public library, use their computers and internet connection, and their books to learn HTML and if you are feeling industrious CSS, and BOOM. You can have your own manifesto on the internet for all the world to see and fear.

So yes, I am unhappy that social media has made its inevitable transformation into mountains of fecal matter. Yes, I’m unhappy that for so many the internet is just a place to 1)buy things (though god damn I do love buying some things)and 2)plugging in to the 24-7 outrage machine, BUT I feel reminded and more aware than I’ve been in years that the old internet is still there and it is still absolutely fucking amazing.

I understand that not everyone has this crazy compulsion to post their thoughts, the records they buy, the shows they see, and pictures of their cat to the internet, but I really want to encourage friends who are so inclined to do it. I mean, you can have your own domain name so cheap every year, and web hosting even cheaper.

Tonight I created this simple page, by hand, in a text editor. It’s been a while since I’ve done this. I can write basic HTML and build sites from memory. I need a little refresher and some references to do CSS. And of course, I embedded a video from my Vimeo account just to see how it looks. The only hard part was finding the meta tag that made it look good on a phone (without the right tag the text was super tiny). Yes, it’s a shitty page, but not really. It loads fast. Regardless what device you see it on it works. Turns out that plain old HTML is nice and responsive. I’m going to work on it as a site. Get the style sheet the way I want it, see if I can find a good way to generate an RSS feed without automating the whole site with a static site generator. But Matthew was right. Writing it on a text editor and pushing it up to my server with an FTP client is wizardly and grand, which I had forgotten.