Category: internet culture

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Website Details, Blogging, and Ethics

First. Yes, I’m posting a lot today.

A couple of years ago when I “discovered” the notion of the IndieWeb I also spent a lot of time exploring blogs. By blogs, I mean REAL blogs. The kind written by real human people, about their lives and opinions and ideas, on which they are not trying to sell things. I don’t like that the interwebs have become, in the mind of the Great Unwashed Masses, just a marketplace. I don’t like “app culture”. So I looked for other bloggers doing good work and started following them via RSS (in my case, using the Reeder app — yes — I know – a fucking APP!!! — but in this case it’s doing the lord’s work).

If you still don’t know what RSS is and why it can make your life better, read this thing I wrote.

So, getting to the point…

I found the blog Minutes to Midnight, by a person who would become an internet/blogging friend, Simone Silvestroni. Looking over his blogroll I found other good writers. I also discovered the word “colophon”, which I will be adding to this site, but more importantly on his colophon I found some really interesting information that I actually care about. In particular, notions of website accessibility and how green a site is. Lots of good links and info on that page! For example – links. Look people. Links need to be easy to find. The text needs to be a different color, have enough contrast to the rest of the page, and be-fucking-underlined. Likewise, I learned about green websites — sites that use less energy to serve up a page. And page design that uses less energy. I think Minutes to Midnight is where I learned to stop being obsessed with analytics and to not spy on my readers (or help Google spy on them).

I was surprised to find that the host of this site, dreamhost.com, seems to use a green amount of energy. I’ve tested the pages here. I was very surprised to see that my micro.blog sites aren’t as green as my dreamhost sites. I am not stressing about it, because honestly my sites over there get so little traffic. I’m working on getting all my sites nice and accessible. The biggest issue on micro.blog is that I tend to change themes on some of them a lot, and it takes to put the link underlines back in. This site could be greener. It runs on WordPress. Honestly, I’d rather it be static pages, but at this point I’m not going to convert over 1000 posts and pages. In the future, however, who knows?

One thing I’ve become more aware of is the effect of images and video on my pages. I’m trying to be more aware of not using images or video unless they are really the point of a post. If words will get the job done I just type the words.

October 6 will be the 20-year anniversary of this blog.

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Noise

I’ve been reading the Minutes to Midnight blog for a year or two now.

Simone recently wrote an article called Noise. Then he wrote More About Noise. As you’ll see in the 2nd article, this topic seems to have struck a chord with a lot of people. I was one of those who emailed him about the first article.

More and more I find myself affected by noise of all sorts. So many things want my attention, and I only have so much I can healthily give. Only so much that I want to give. And yet the world and the internet often feel like a parasite attached to my frontal lobe, drawing out my attention — my focus – faster than it can be replenished.

It’s an addiction. Plain and simple.

I often joke that people are terrified of being alone only their own thoughts. But honestly it’s not a joke. It’s the truth. With the smartphone you can be connected all – the – fucking – time to the Beast. You think you are getting something, but you’re not. You are giving something.  Something that is limited in quantity and precious beyond compare. Your time and attention. Maybe your sanity too.

I had hoped by now to have a plan of action for 2026 for really altering my tech ownership and use. Simplification. Intention. Awareness. As I just wrote those three words I realized that maybe that is my plan. My ongoing plan. Evaluating what devices I use, and what is on them. Evaluating what digital services I use. Evaluating the software I use. Evaluating where and how I store my own data. Do I continue using the “cloud”? Is that really needed? How much of it is noise? Probably a lot.

There’s a lot to think about.

A few years ago I read a number of books about Zen. I have never really “practiced”, though I feel like aikido shares some principles with Zen practice. Maybe that’s why Zen really spoke to me. I read about Zazen, the practice of the Zen form of meditation without a goal. No “success”. You just sit there quietly, staring at a blank wall, and let your thoughts pass through your mind without really doing anything with them. My understanding is that you learn that thoughts are “just what your brain makes”, and it can make a lot of them. You observe them. You don’t act on them. You just let them happen. It seems like what you come to find is that most of them are, in fact, noise.

We already have enough noise in our heads already, generated by our own brains. We don’t need to add the noise of everyone else’s brain to that bedlam.

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Yet another new web project

A couple of friends and I are working on a web-zine. The idea is to create a website as the homepage of the zine, and each zine is done as separate issues. Not an ongoing blog. A zine, with discrete issues. I’m fiddling around with it here…

The Cookies of Discontent

As part of this project I am building the site “old-school.: No content management system. No commenting system. Not even an RSS feed. Just hand-coded html pages done in a text editor, server-side includes, and CSS. An email address people can use to comment if they choose to do so. I feel like interactions like “likes” are bullshit. They’re cheap. If someone really wants to comment, then email us. No associate social media sites. We’ll notify a few friends of the project, and that’s it.

It’s been a lot of fun to work on this.

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A good article

My wife pointed out this article today…

https://jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/the-threat-no-one-wants-to-talk-about

It’s a really good article. Over the last few years I’ve really struggled with my participation in social media. Frankly, I’ve hit delete on many posts here on this blog, often before every publishing them, because I don’t want to be part of the problem.

In this article, Sexton really crystalizes some of the feelings I’ve been having about the internet, tech bros and the influence of so-called “big tech”, and my own role in it (even if mine is an infinitesimally tiny role).