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.
