Category: web design

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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!!!!!!

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Modifying Blog Theme

I have been changing the theme of this blog a lot this week.

I’m trying to make it look good on phones and tablets, which meant ditching the sidebar.

I’m also trying to adhere to good accessibility practices. The structure of the pages is good. I ran it through a couple of checkers. I was displeased with the color of the links. While I like this theme, I think clickable links should either be a different color from the rest of the text, or be underlined, or both. Themes these days are so damned complicated – they are hard to modify.

But anyway, I made all the links on the blog underlined. I’ll probably change their color too.

There I did it.

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No email notifications for a while…

I was fiddling with this blog the other day and deactivated Jetpack briefly. Jetpack is the plugin that runs the email notifications for new posts, and collects stats. I turned it off because I no longer wish to see stats.

Now Jetpack will not reconnect.

For a non-coder I’m pretty good at this stuff, but damned if I can get it to work.

Honestly, I probably should keep it removed. I don’t like them tracking my website through the plugin. They might…you know…discover all the secrets I’m publishing publicly here.

The ability to do a free email newsletter summery of a blog is BUILT IN to micro.blog . I have considered moving this whole blog to that system. Actually I’ve tried it, but the blog is approaching 1000 posts, and lots of images and files, and micro.blog choked on it. I think the formatting of the WordPress site is just slightly not friendly to MB. I will try it again.

Anyway, if you are reading this and would normally have gotten it via email, this is the reason. There are about 23 of you.

I’m likely going to just keep Jetpack uninstalled. I really only want the email list if I can still get it, but with only 23 people subscribed it might be easier to just to start over.

I really recommend you use an RSS app, like Reeder or NetNewsWire to keep up with this and other blogs.

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Getting all 1999

The internet has become a mass of click-bait bullshit and other crud.

Have you noticed that? Do I need to make a list of the 10 different examples of how the internet sucks now?

I’m sure it is just nostalgia, but man, I feel it is too easy to publish stuff on the web and make it look slick now. Because now, making it look slick is what it’s all about.

That late Bill Hicks lamented that it seems that “shilling” for products, like Doritos, seems to be the highest aspiration of anyone these days. I agree with him, and reject that non-ethic of marketing evil.

So I’m working on a new site that is hand-coded in a text editor, uploaded by FTP, uses Server Side Includes to create the header and footer, has the absolute minimum formatting, and just looks really bare-bones.

This new site will be, of course, about skateboarding. It is to be a back-to-the-basics webpage about back-to-the-basics skating.

It will have no social media tie-in. No “like” buttons. It will have no advertising. It’s videos will not be available on youtube. They will be hosted on my server. (I do have a test youtube video in there right now, but it will be removed).

My only concession to the modern age will be the use of Google Analytics to track my site.

Can a non-linked site that doesn’t participate in social media, accepts no comments, and has only an email address for communication actually get an audience in the age of tumblr, twitter, and facebook? I have no idea. It’s an experiment.

The new site is theinsanelament.org. This is the only link I will ever up up for it, anywhere.

 

 

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Back on WordPress.com

OK, after thinking about it for a couple of days, I’ve moved this blog back over to WordPress.com, using the same redirect that I’m using on concretelunch.net (the redirect described in this post). The advantages of using the WordPress free service are just too great. Sure, you lose the ability to tweak your style sheets and templates (unless you pay), but for this kind of blog the advantages far outweigh that slight disadvantage. It isn’t like I was doing anything creative with the template design anyway.

So if you are one of the 1 or 2 sites that actually links to bibliosk8.net, you don’t need to change anything. My scripting genius (i.e., the script I found in 5 seconds with a web search) has taken care of that for you.

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Combining free blog hosting with your own domain name.

Hosting a site on a free service like WordPress.com has some advantages. For one thing, they really keep the blogging software up to date, with constant improvements, new widgets, etc. You never have to lift a finger to upgrade. The problem is that you are limited as to disk space, bandwidth, etc. This is why this blog is not run on WordPress.com – I wanted to go beyond the services that WordPress provides for free. I have a rented server account with Dreamhost.com, on which I can host as many domain names as I need, with tons of bandwidth and storage.

I recently started a new skateboarding blog called “concretelunch.net“. I plan on using a lot of photos and videos on the site, which will require both disk space and bandwidth. I purchased the domain name, but I’d rather host the blog — which will be the “homepage” — for free on WordPress.com. At the same time, I want to use my Concretelunch.net domain name (so I can just refer to “concretelunch.net”, rather than “wordpress.concretelunch.com”) and also use that domain to host and serve large files, run other applications, etc.

Here is a nice way to make it all work. I set up the blog on WordPress.com. Then on my server, under the domain concretelunch.net, I deleted the existing index.html file, replacing it with index.php . The index.php file contains only the following code — a simple redirect to my WordPress.com blog:

<?php
header( ‘Location: http://www.yoursite.com’ ) ;
?>

The nice thing about using a redirect like this is that I can use WordPress.com’s free service for low bandwidth stuff, but if I want to point to something like a gallery URL, like “concretelunch.net/gallery” (which doesn’t exist yet), I can do that easily. Of course, this only works because the server I host my domain name on runs the PHP scripting language. However, you could easily find a PERL or JavaScript redirect script to use instead.

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Moving your site to a new server: some tricks

For those of you who aren’t techies, here is a basic technique for bypassing the “middle man” (your own computer) when moving your website from one server to another. By harnessing the power of the Linux command line, you can really save some time in a most kickass way.

If you have a website with a lot of content, like large picture galleries or video files, moving to a new server presents some challenges. I’m going to ignore the obvious challenge of getting all the systems, like your blog system, your gallery program, etc, to work again. The most basic challenge I’ve found is simply moving those large files and directories. For example, if you have a directory with 400 megs of images in it, and you need to move the whole thing to a new server, but you have a normal DSL line at home with a horribly slow upload speed, it is simply not practical to download the whole directory to your computer then upload it to the new one. It will take all day.

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