💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~astro › gemlog › 2024 › 05-21-2024-Websites.gmi captured on 2024-08-25 at 00:08:31. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Personal websites

In a focused effort to get off of Reddit, I searched for another Absorbing Creative Interest. The current one is looking at Gemini posts on a number of different servers. Today this popped up:

Dumb, or Weird, or Cringe, or Whatever by ~winter

It's a pretty cool story about ~winter and their return to building personal sites. It brought back lots of my memories of GeoCites, Myspace, etc. Favorites of mine were the flashing icons of "site under constructions" that were on the page and the "Page best viewed on" XYZ browser. (My page said "Best viewed on my desktop" )

A full range of underconstruction icons for your amusement.

I had accounts on the Compuserve and loaded up AOL from one of the many hundreds of CD's that they sent in the mail. Voicenet (miss you 'Rigfordive') was my feed site for my Waffle BBS system. (It was easier to download Usenet over night, read and respond during the day. Lather, rinse, repeat.

My Voicenet site had an amazing navigation system based on frames. Not to brag, but at the time I was the Master of Frames. But we all know that adding new stuff into the menu was/is painful. So I built an AWK script that would read the file names, the structure for the menu items and build the HTML for the frames. So as you moved up the directory structure the right frame was shown with the right links. (Now I have this compelling need to dig through the archive disks to see if I can find it.)

The site was more like a wiki for things that I was interested in. At the time I worked at a place that had Confluence and it was super expensive to run it as a single user. I found JSPWiki, it used text files, and that gave me the ability to do all the information gathering I wanted. So since 2002 it's been the home for most of the things that I need to remember from how the Russian fireplace works, to how many cookies were baked every year for Christmas. It was a pretty eclectic mix of stuff. It runs safely in my homelab.

Voicenet had a BBS component for local conversations, and I had access to Usenet. So there was access all over the place for conversations. I think the only thing that is out there that is close to general mayhem is Reddit. There are also a ton of Discords out there that people can roam on.

As far as customized sites, there are builders like Wix, Squarespace, weebly and the many Wordpress hosters. I run a few Wordpress sites, they are easy to set up, run and somewhat maintain. Lots of Wordpress hosters do automatic site and plugin management. Blogger is still around. I've been messing around with a blog site that posts are done via email. (https://posthaven.com) I know lots of people that are blogging their life adventures on all these platforms.

But there is Facebook. One of the things that lots of you reading this share is a higher level of computer skills. So it's easy for you to stand up you own personal site. The open Unix systems like the tilde.club are pretty easy to use, but even I got tripped up the other day. I was trying to push Gems from my Windows box and forgot about the CF/LF issue. Facebook lowers that skill need level to something that almost everyone can do.

Sadly, there are issues around the Internet that have to do with humans. The amount of people that are gaming people over the net is appaling. I often think that if all the people that abuse the initial idea of interconnecting everything had spent the time, we would have solved world hunger, cured cancer, in general made this place a better one. But here we are.

I'm also worried about the lack of people to do critical thinking. When matched with the robot farms, the ability of AI to conjur weird ideas into paragraphs that sound plausible, and people that at would been at best on a wooden fruit box in a town square, the Internet has become a very scary place.

Updated 5/21/2024