Notes

The Internet Archive / Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/) is absolutely incredible. It has saved most of my old posts and pages. Been spending a week or so rescuing those posts and bringing them back.

If you’re new to the internet, allow me to give you a brief explanation.

The “Internet” is series of connected networks across the world that form bigger networks. A network is a series of connected things (computers and routers in the case of the internet).

The world wide web (www) sits on top of the internet (as does email and other things too) The world wide web is what a lot of people are referring to when they talk about the internet.

Most of the web now is basically a bog of surveillance advertising. Where pretty much all of your interactions on the web — and often email now too — are being tracked by companies looking to make money off knowing exactly what you get up to online.

It’s an absolute fucking disgrace.

The world wide web could have been such a beautiful thing — democratising publishing and giving everyone an equal voice. And for a while I think it was heading that way. But big technology companies grew out of this web, like spiders catching all the flies. These big companies then started merging and coalescing into the Googles, Facebooks and Twitters we now have.

This is the world that has been born out of capitalist greed and the surveillance used to accrue wealth.

There are some awesome people that are doing their best to create alternatives to all of the surveillance honeypots that take up the majority of bandwidth.

People like Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag at the Small Technology Foundation. They are building a viable alternative to the cancer of “big tech”.

And Eugen, who created Mastodon — living proof that you don’t need millions in investment capital to build something for the web that gets used my thousands and thousands of people.

We need more people building for the future of people, not corporations, and I want to be one of them.

I have just written this post and then lost it without saving. I am annoyed. That said, I’ll try and rewrite without rushing too much.

I’m always tinkering around with this website. As a result I tend to sometimes get bored with it. I feel the design just looks dull and uninspired, and find that my backend could be a lot cleaner… phrasing. I then feel that my website needs to be improved – and as a result rebuilt.

This is the inner critic talking.

You know that guy/gal right? They are the one that sits back doing naff-all and only pipes up to say something when you’ve created something, or are thinking of doing so, and says “That’s shit – what are you thinking?”. The inner critic is a fecking wonker (intentional fake swearing) and needs to be put down.

Something I listened to last week really hit home with me about this. On this episode of The Web Ahead podcast, Jen Simmons talked with Jeremy Keith about understanding the web. I am always inspired when hearing Jeremy talk about the web and building for it

This is when the site never gets launched because it’s never quite good enough. The number of designers who haven’t launched because it doesn’t look quite right, or the number of developers because they haven’t finished writing their own CMS.

Jeremy Keith on The Web Ahead episode #110

In this episode He and Jen were talking about how people – in general – are so used to publishing on the web through a service – or gatekeeper as they called it. Also they mentioned about people’s habit of self-censoring and imposing their own restrictions.

It was after listening to this that I realised that my own reasons for thinking I needed to rebuild my site were all self-imposed reasons and that it was stopping me from actually writing stuff. I have been concentrating too much on the tools of publishing instead of actually just publishing.

So this entry is a way for me to try and break that habit. Let’s see how long I can keep it up for… phrasing.

The more I see how JavaScript gets used in websites I visit, the more I despair. Like when extra content gets loaded in, I click a link in that extra content to go to another page – so far, fine. But then if I click the back button in browser it won’t jump to where I was previously because that content isn’t there any more – not until I scroll down or click the ‘load more’ link at least. I dare say there is a responsible way to approach this. Here’s my idea – just paginate the results and provide page links. Zany idea I know.

I think I may be getting a little bit obsessed with my document outline.

I love the web. Fridge packs up last night – and I’ve already found a second hand replacement to pick up tonight. Boom.