Blog 2
Hello, again, world! Two rainy days in a row, means I get to play around with the ~club for a while. I’ve been pretty excited, looking at the different sites and coming up with new ideas. Let’s see how long the momentum lasts. Last night as I was exploring the webring, it came to my attention how many of these sites have never, not even once, been touched. Some have been touched just once, and some have been “under construction” for years already. A lot more of them have been touched but they are quite short on content, or point to users' main pages elsewhere. Nothing to blame, here, of course. And I haven’t looked at the gemlogs or gopherholes. I alsog got to explore a few other webrings and neocities sites, as well as other tildespaces. I think it’s pretty cool that there’s a sort of “revival” of the old web, the web of the 90s/00s. When one spends their time in the “big sites”, it may seem like the whole world is concentrated on those sites. I was surprised to learn that ~club has been around for at least a decade! Everybody knows about (anti)social media, it’s ills and problems. But all that talk about how bad the algorithm is and how harmful social media turn out to be tends to ignore the burgeoning activity that’s happening under the mainstream, precisely in what has been called the “smolweb”, and beyond. The huge influence of shitty sites like reddit and 4chan (not to mention the even worse corporate web) seems to have given people the impression that there is hardly any alternative, and that the smolweb is, to all purposes, dead. I guess this goes hand in hand with screen addiction, the need for constant stimulation, to have someone reply to you within minutes, and also to have everything at hand and not be willing to go out of your usual space and truly “surf the web”, as we used to say back then. But the truth is that, well, look at all the webrings out there. Certainly, if one keeps clicking the banner on the ~club webring, it may seem like hardly anybody has made any changes to their public_html directory. I found one site here according to which, out of 2k+ users, over 600 have not even once made any change. That’s usually how it goes with these sites that demand a certain amount of effort. Hand-writing html takes at least some effort, and many users forget about their registration about as soon as they get it. This paints a seemingly grim picture on the activity of these sites. But if we look at the other side of the issue, we will see that, even if a small percentage of the users here do take their time to craft their sites, let’s say (for the sake of argument) some 10% of the users, we still have over 200 pages to explore… now the issue is to find them, but that’s all the fun! Add to these all the neocities sites and the sites in other tildespaces, the kinds of sites you can find on wiby.me, and other projects like midnight.city, and you certainly have a big small web to explore, and make friends. Not only that, there is also IRC, there are a huge number of MUDs, and you can always make a few email penpals. I recently added myself to the email club in the server, and you should too! Which means, feel free to drop me an email any time. We tend to forget about email, but if we make a network of friendships over email, I’d daresay it would make for a far more personal and resilient kind of internet, that doesn’t depend on a single service (well, sure, email, but email is by far the most stable protocol on the internet), and one that goes mostly under the radar of the evil corps and surveillance agencies. Not that it’s completely safe, not at all, it just doesn’t get as much attention as the big centres of activity, and a network of personal acquaintances is far more difficult to shut down or infiltrate. Well, I’ve talked at length about some of my thoughts about these spaces. Later I may write some more, about my projects, and more stuff that comes to my mind. For the time being, I wish you all a good day (or night), and I will… ttyl!
Blog #1
Hello, world :-) This is my first attempt at using the bb tool on tilde.club. I am exploring the many possibilities of this site. Today I spent a good while configuring my site, tweaking the css, setting up the layout of the site directory, and trying out the cgi capabilities. As I wrote on the index page, editing html by hand absolutely sucks. Right away I found this tool, bb, for blogging in plaintext format, so I will indeed use this for blogging purposes. On the other hand, I am still not sure how to manage the rest of the html site. One idea is to keep a separate directory with text files and make a script to wrap everything in html tags and put it in the html directory… or something along those lines. Anyway, it has been fun so far. I have a few other ideas, things I want to do, etc. Let’s see how this all plays out. Right now I’m posting this to see how it all works.