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The personal website is a somewhat mysterious animal that lives mostly unobserved in the jungle of the Internet. A few inexperienced Internet users who live completely within the golden-walled gardens of Facebook and Google may not even be aware of the species' existence. Other inexperienced users may consider the personal website to be either extinct, like brontosaurus, or a myth, like Bigfoot or the Abominable Snowman. The truth is that many specimens exist in the wild, but in order to successfully hunt the personal website, a hunter must know the habits of this species well.
Please allow me to be your guide on this safari through the murky and predator-filled Internet jungle, and I will lead you to some representative specimens of the personal website species and teach you hunting methods that are likely to lead you to others.
As legend has it, during a more peaceful time, soon after the genesis of the Internet jungle and before the mid 1990's, personal websites were the predominant species. But queen Sophia the demiurge, wife of King Berners-Lee, at the pleading of her daughter Pandora, acquiesced to provide a breeding ground for Pandora's pets. Over time, more and more pets were allowed to roam free in the jungle, including not a few predators. Eventually, these pets became the predominant species of the Internet jungle and personal websites became nearly invisible among all the bellowing and commotion raised by Pandora's pets. This near invisibility made personal websites very difficult to hunt.
Before discussing personal websites in detail, I should first mention two common predators in the Internet jungle. The corporate predator induces the Internet user to willingly approach him by pretending to be a harmless domesticated animal, much like a horse or a cow. Note that not all corporate websites are predators, though a large number of them do have certain similarities to cows, ponderousness often being one. But, many corporate websites are not nearly as domesticated as they appear. Just read the details of their terms-of-service agreements if you doubt this. As with many humans and their cats, the truth is that deciding in any given instance whether a corporate website or its Internet user is the dominant species can be a difficult task.
A less well understood animal is the hacker. Hacker is a genus containing a number of species. Some are predatory, and others are harmless or even beneficial to the ecology of the Internet jungle. By far, the most populous species of predatory hacker is the "script kiddie". Script kiddies tend to be blind, feeling their way around the Internet jungle from IP address to IP address. Their goal seems to be to find those websites that have ingested corporate website code that has made them susceptible to infection. When a script kiddie finds such a website, it frequently injects malware, which it sometimes uses to help it find and attack other websites.
The reason for the script kiddie's behavior remains a mystery, since it usually provides little nourishment. Some script kiddie observers speculate that script kiddies engage in the noted behavior simply to impress others of their species. While other animals must impress potential mates in order to improve the genetics of their offspring, most potential mates of script kiddies seem unimpressed by their behavior. A possibility also exists that the script kiddie's behavior serves primarily as a means of determining pecking order, primarily among males of the species. However, one observation that tends to bolster the mating theory is that most script kiddies that have successfully mated no longer engage in their typical behavior.
Even many moderately experienced hunters fear the personal website because they have been led to believe that personal websites frequently carry diseases--viruses in particular, or parasites generally known as "malware". Though both of these are possible, they are uncommon. The truth is that personal websites practice habits that are generally no less cleanly than other Internet jungle species. However, some of the less wary personal websites do become susceptible to viruses and malware by ingesting code defecated by corporate websites, including code from the unusually flatulent and dyspeptic Microshaft. Nevertheless, hunters' fear of personal websites is largely overblown. Well-equipped hunters have little to fear.
Unlike most other animals that must constantly evade predators to survive, the personal website has few known enemies. The personal website is, however, susceptible to the DMCA parasite, which is capable of suing it to death. Fortunately, this is a rare occurrence, perhaps mainly due to the near invisibility of the personal website. For this reason, and because personal websites are almost always so small that they have very little meat on them (otherwise known as posts or articles), they are rarely in danger from predators. Personal websites also tend to taste bad to the larger corporate predators, as they rarely advertise or produce much of an income. Very rarely, however, a well-fed personal website may grow to a large enough size to successfully compete with corporate websites for the food provided by users. When this occurs, some observers fear this fat personal website may be in danger of being killed (see here, here, here, and here), but few corporate predators ingest even the fattest personal websites, perhaps because they simply do not know what to do with them. On rare occasions, however, corporate predators will capture both personal and non-revenue-generating corporate websites and allow them to live for a few more years while dying slow deaths from starvation.
Unlike other animals that are seen or heard mainly at mating time, personal websites do not reveal their presence in this manner, because they do not mate. Instead, they reproduce asexually. Some produce offspring by budding, a plantlike characteristic. Many, if not most, also exhibit another plantlike characteristic. They sprinkle their spoors (technically, known as hyperlinks) over the floor of the Internet jungle in the hope of being one day chanced upon by an Internet user and ingested. Though ingestion rarely occurs, when it does, through some process not well understood by present-day science, the Internet user is occasionally induced to create his own personal website. This website is then free to bud under the careful attention and care of the host Internet user, who has now been transformed into an entity sometimes known as a "developer", though developer is not an especially well-defined designator. At the proper time, the new website naturally begins to produce its own spoors, and its life cycle repeats.
Sometimes, spoors and bits of code are exchanged directly with other personal websites, in a manner analogous to bacterial conjugation, in which genetic material, called plasmids, are exchanged between bacteria. This type of spoor is known as a "backlink". Sometimes, websites collect backlinks and place them in groups called blogrolls.
As alluded to previously, the main reason personal websites are so difficult to find in the Internet jungle is that they are almost completely invisible to the bloodhounds of the Internet, known as "search engines". Search engines use search algorithms, rather than smell, to find websites. Except on rare occasions, the only search in which a personal website appears on any page of a search result is a search that includes the personal website's exact domain name (its location in the Internet jungle) or the exact title of one its articles. Therefore, less than a hundred of the most popular personal websites can be found through the overwhelming majority of Internet searches. Though this may be hard to believe, it is true.
Even the smaller search engines like millionshort.com and swisscows.com are largely blind to any personal websites other than the top 100. Internet zoologists speculate that smaller search engines are not actually blind to personal websites. They only pretend to be blind by keeping their eyes tightly closed whenever they encounter a personal website, so as to imitate their leader, the Google search engine, which is truly blind to all but the top 100 or so personal websites.
Due to the lack of attention that personal websites receive, they often congregate together, or at least maintain an association with others of their kind. They do this for survival. You see, personal websites need some amount of attention to survive. If they cannot get attention from Internet users, they try to get it from each other. This is the primary behavior by which an experienced hunter may successfully track them.
When by the greatest stroke of luck, a hunter happens to stumble upon a nearly-invisible personal website, he should immediately look for others nearby. Personal websites often have blogrolls or other internal links that lead a persistent hunter to others of their species. Here are some blogrolls of personal websites that I have been lucky enough to track down during my hunts in the well-lighted regions of the Internet jungle.
https://distinctly.pink/blogroll.html
https://kevq.uk/blogroll
https://jlelse.blog/blogroll
https://www.garron.blog/blogroll.html
https://jan.boddez.net/links
https://blogs.sirodoht.com
https://personalsit.es
Sometimes website congregation is voluntary, and sometimes it is the result of having been collected or captured by a social media website. Here are a few congregation points that I have found:
Neocities
Indieweb
Blogger
Blogarama
write.as
The webring, an exceedingly rare, nearly extinct Internet jungle species, can also lead hunters to personal websites because webrings are more visible to search engines than are personal websites.
Though nearly all social media animals have an extreme distaste for the meat of the personal website, some forum animals like Hacker News and Voat are more tolerant of it than most. Patient hunters may benefit by searching these websites for the meat of personal websites and following the associated spoors to their dens (also known as home pages or main pages).
Some parts of the Internet jungle are more productive hunting grounds for personal websites than others. One especially productive hunting ground is called Gopherspace. From its name, one may be inclined to wonder if Gopherspace could be a region of the Internet jungle that contains giant gophers or other rodents of unusual size. Sadly, this is not the case. Gopherspace is predominantly populated by personal websites. It is an area of the Internet that was larger in the 1990's, but has since shrunken to a rather small size. Hunters who manage to find Gopherspace will immediately be amazed by the total absence of all corporate predators. You see, Gopherspace does not contain sufficient quantities of users who believe that corporate websites are as harmless as they pretend to be. Hence, Gopherspace users refuse to feed corporate predators. This is one of a number of reasons that corporate predators would immediately starve to death should they ever risk building their dens in Gopherspace.
Other excellent hunting grounds for personal websites are the less traveled, and therefore, largely misunderstood regions of the Internet that are said to be cloaked in perpetual darkness. These areas are called the "darknets". Here, personal websites are the predominant species, and corporate predators are rare. Some darknets are the Tor network, the IPFS network, the I2P network, and ZeroNet. Despite claims to the contrary by some media beasts who have never actually visited the darknets, the darknets are still tiny in comparison to the rest of the Internet jungle.
An interesting fact is that, thanks in part to the the near total absence of corporate predators and government species in the darknets, these areas are growing in number and size. More users are coming to the darknets in particular to breathe in the wonderful aroma of a beautiful flower called "free speech". Not many free speech flowers continue to bloom in the well-lighted areas of the Internet jungle. Almost all have now been trampled by corporate and government animals.
Internet zoologists are currently studying the fauna of the darknets to better understand their prospects for continued survival. Some believe darknets may one day grow to be larger than the rest of the Internet jungle. Others are doubtful. I guess we will just have to wait and see.
Another interesting fact about "darknets" is that the name is largely a misnomer; darknets are only dark to corporate predators whose eyes can only see with large dollar signs illuminating the landscape. Since darknets contain few or no dollar signs, all but a very few corporate predators stay away. The eyes of the Internet user, however, can see without the light of dollar signs. This makes them well-adapted to explore the darknets. Unfortunately, however, the average Internet user has been led to believe by predatory corporate animals and two-faced government animals that the darknets of the Internet jungle are too predator-filled and dangerous to explore, so few but the most experienced users venture into them.
I was lucky enough during one hunt to discover the personal website of an experienced and brave darknet hunter. Her personal website has already budded to produce a number of offspring on both light and darknets. She has created the largest blogroll of darknet websites that I have seen so far, and many of the websites in her blogroll are personal websites.
To summarize, though some Internet users are unaware of this fact, a large number of personal websites still exist in the Internet jungle. They can be found in the well-lighted regions, but Gopherspace and the darknets are more productive hunting grounds. Since search engines in the well-lighted areas of the Internet jungle are nearly blind to all but the most well-known personal websites, other hunting methods are more productive in those areas. Some of those methods are: looking for webrings, searching for personal website congregation points, and combing the blogrolls of previously-discovered personal websites.
This concludes our safari through the Internet jungle. Thank you for allowing me to be your guide. If any readers have developed other techniques for hunting personal websites, please share them via the comment form below.
If you have found this article worthwhile, please share it with your favorite social media animals. You will find links at the top of the page.
UPDATED: Another list of links to personal websites is The Big List of Personal Websites.