Write something https://seths.blog/2021/09/write-something/
webtech
Better than IRL: “Finding your people on the internet of the mid-2000s.”
Having small children is an incredible experience, it can take in your whole world. Years fly by and you can be so very focused on our family and work that, unfortunately, you can lose track of a lot of friends, and your social life pretty much disappears.
When we got to put our heads above ground again in the mid-2000s, I found Tumblr (via Sussanah Breslin) and it really helped me to put my cultural self back together. Sharing work, art and ideas, meeting so many amazing people, (and I didn’t even need to go outside!) it really was an incredibly important time for me and I am very grateful to all of those who made that happen. I suppose the GDSP project was one of the many high points of that.
I left Tumblr behind when they brought in the censorship rules in because it seemed it was leaving the people who made it cool and essential behind, but I have been working hard on keeping my internet positive and fulfilling in that tradition.
It is the history of this spirit and time that Katie West, photographer, writer and publisher is documenting in her new book project “Better than IRL” currently open to pre orders on Kickstarter.
“Better Than IRL is a collection of true stories about the years when the internet first started gaining traction as a place to build connections and community. With 20 essays written by pioneers and participants from online communities, this paperback (or digital book!) looks at how this specific time on the internet changed us, and how we can take the elements that made it so much better than IRL with us into the future.”
“The book will be personal and hopeful. It won’t be nostalgic moaning about how the internet isn’t what it once was—it will discuss how it made us into who we are now and how we can take the lessons we learned about inclusion and belonging to be better people going forward. With talented authors from Canada, South Africa, Pakistan, USA, Singapore, UK, and Liberia, the book covers a wide array of experiences with the beginnings of the Web 2.0.”
Katie began a chat group on Instagram upon the launch of the Kickstarter, last week, and invited many of us who found each other then and it has really brought back many special memories and friendships.
I really hope the book gets funded, I urge you to consider backing the project, and sharing with anyone else you know who might be interested. The money doesn’t go out of you account until the project is fully funded, if that helps.
Feed Update
As I have ceased using Tumblr as my proto-microblog I have shifted its Feedburner RSS over to the microblog on this site.
If you subscribed to my tumblr on Feedburner you will see a reduction in the frequency of posts but hopefully an increase in quality. 👌
The feeds for this site are now Micro, Macro and Both.
There is more information on Subscribing here.
Hope you all have a great New Years.
You can’t pin in #Gmail and you can’t star in #Inbox, so if you’re moving back from Inbox to Gmail, as enforced, use the search term “label:pinned” in Gmail and then you can star everything you need from there.
Tumblr Closedown
This is cross posted form my Tumblr:
This is officially my last post here, this was my first.
I will stop actively using Tumblr as of the 17th Dec 2018.
I object to Tumblr’s years of benefiting and gaining trust from the artistic community to then go on and remove and destroy a decades worth of work, archives and culture with impunity.
I have decided not to completely delete my page here, most of what I have posted is not at risk from being removed by the algorithm, and, besides, I am still proud of the tens of thousands of posts I have collected.
Tumblr was the first place I felt truly at home on the internet and I have found many excellent friends and collaborators through it. I am currently working hard to make sure I am following all of you/them elsewhere, preferably with RSS, but with whatever form they find most suits them.
Life goes on and I have been maintaining a blog over on WordPress for many years, it has two parts, one that showcases my own work & history and another that is much more like the scrapbook style of blogging I have been pursuing here collecting and collating things I find.
Both parts of the blog are at paulgreer.net/blog, you are very welcome to come and find me there and explore, I am active most days.
I am also very active on Twitter (@burningfp), Instagram (@burningfp) and Pinterest (@burningfp).
Pages at Facebook (@burningfp), Ello (@burningfp), Mastodon (@paulgreer) update less frequently, but I am working on it.
I would like to thank everyone that has made using this site the magical, empowering and life changing experience it has been for me, and I wish all of you the very best for the future.
Kind regards,
Paul
NOTEPAD-2018-WEEKS-04-05
This week’s links and internet. Put together through a mixture of cut and paste and ifttt procedures.
Be kind. Be useful. It’s not complicated. Most other things are a bonus.
There are things after the jump. ↩
NOTEPAD-2018-WEEKS-03-04
I’m scheduling these to happen on Sundays now, as I have said before the page builds itself during the week and it’s just a case of slight formatting to get to publish it.
Silos and the Open Web
On Blogs, RSS and Social Media:
The Open Web movement asserts a special role for public, cooperative, and standard World Wide Web communications; it opposes private, exclusive, proprietary Web solutions.
Computer scientist Tantek Çelik gives three aspects of the Open Web:
- publish content and applications on the web in open standards
- code and implement the web standards depend on
- access and use content / code / web-apps / implementations
— Wiki
An information silo, or a group of such silos, is an insular management system in which one information system or subsystem is incapable of reciprocal operation with others that are, or should be, related. Thus information is not adequately shared but rather remains sequestered within each system or subsystem, figuratively trapped within a container like grain is trapped within a silo: there may be a lot of it, and it may be stacked quite high and freely available within those limits, but it has no effect outside those limits.
— Wiki
Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to go full-bore blog again, like in the old days. Twitter’s only real use is as a notification system, after all, so you’d just pump out post links to it from your blog. You know, the way people used to, when having a place for your own voice and your own thoughts was a good thing.
When I was in the swing of it, way back when, it was like the world’s most minimalist radio station. A Station Ident post to start the day, a Night Music or Closedown post at the end of the day, littered with whatever strangeness and wonder passed my screen in between.
I miss that long moment when the web seemed full of people doing the same thing, or thinking in public. It happens in the Republic Of Newsletters, now. But it was nice to have all those little radio stations broadcasting in the night.
The above tweeter, RSS pioneer, David Winer has made an RSS feed for journalists. Eliot Landrum has followed suit with an RSS feed for Open Architects. These are in the form of OPML files that can be read in your RSS reader of choice.
Re-sort
I have been reorganising my site a bit. I decided to use the WordPress Portfolio system, which allows you to build a network of pages showcasing work. I thought it might free up some time and energy as there is so much built in functionality there.
It’s early days yet, but I have changed some of the menu above to reflect the changes. You can see the full portfolio pages here.
As well as giving each project it’s own page the system provides specific pages for tags and types so as I add more things the possibilities of how things can be viewed and juxtaposed increases, which I find very interesting.
Here’s a few different groupings below to give you an idea:
Animation
Comics
Pictures
Notebooks
Like I said it’s early days. As I ass more things hopefully it’ll fill out more.
Also I am toying of upgrading my WordPress so I can sell stuff directly from here instead of Big Cartel and that should enable more to do some more CSS modification of the site.
Paul Greer 