Kottke.org is 20 years old today | Hacker News Reader

Kottke.org is 20 years old today

kottke.org

152 pointsartsandsci25 comments

I still remember the way I found his blog -- back then designing a website meant pulling out photoshop to lay things out and using non-websafe fonts in images. Pixel fonts were common in designs and I found Silkscreen, which linked back to kottke.org in the readme :D

Ah I remember those days

http://kottke.org/03/10/some-nice-free-pixel-fonts

Thanks, I'll use this for my new personal site :)

What's the license on them? Free for any use? (Such a lovely designed font.)

What is remarkable is how much worse the web is today.

StopZ. Your being too right.

I used to really like the site but to be honest I stopped quite a few years ago when it became just a set of links with minimal commentary.

Most of the things were stuff I already saw elsewhere. It felt like I was just watching someone else browse the web which seems pretty pointless.

This is my experience as well. I respect Kottke as a blog/media/internet pioneer. But content is lackluster - a collection of links. And the commentary is almost nonexistent.

In the last 18 years or so I've been reading kottke.org, I don't think a single day has gone by without finding something delightful or fascinating.

It's the best site on the internet.

You know what is so great about Jason‘s project? He himself publishes it. He has survived blogging, social media, instagram, Facebook and is still actually interesting. There were so many publishers in the early days when he got started, but so few still publish. In fact, my heart aches for a return to the originality that we had an individual publishing at the time when the site got started.

I’m not being nostalgic. I genuinely, and passionately want to have that specific energy back on the Internet, and believe it will happen eventually as the pendulum swings the other way. There will come a time when people read discover the joy of writing and connecting individually via that writing. So much of the value of the Internet has been supplanted by platforms, to the point where meaning has been lost in interpersonal communications because it has been monetized and in many ways obliterated. Eventually these companies will come back into balance, for users will abandon them because there is no meaning. I suppose, being a student of Roman history, that I could be wrong.

I have been a fan from day one, and I appreciate publishing it. Congratulations.

> I was 24 years old and dumb as a brick. Oh sure, I’d had lots of book learning and was quick with ideas, but I knew shockingly little

Take note, fledglings! That was him, me, and with any luck, future you speaking.

So far, that's been me at every n+5 years or so.

I am sorry this is Off Topic:

Kottke.org is one of the best site, maintained by someone doing it for their interest. And has kept going for twenty years. While I dont visit the site daily, I have kept it on my RSS feeds ( Probably since Pre Google Reader days ), so every once in a while I do read up something interesting, like this post, which has some history worth reading.

I discovered the Ads wasn't appearing. I thought this should be white listed on Ad Block, and it still wasn't appearing. Turns out the Do Not Track privacy features in Firefox stop the ads from showing up. Kottke deserve every bit of ads on the site, and it is only ONE, just one ads!

While i rarely click on ads ( Do they still do CPM? or is it only clicks nowadays? ). I think the Web, Ads, Tracking and Privacy is totally broken. Do we have alternative where ads are generated on Server or Adblock only showing 1 Ads per site. What middle ground solution are there?

The ad I see on the website is an ad from the Carbon Ad network. The ads are clearly targeted, which can only be done if I was tracked. Allowing ads on this site, with the G Suite ad I see right now, creates requests to servedby-buysellads [dot] com, then ad [dot] doubleclick [dot] net.

I personally have no problem seeing an ad for something on a page, as long as it is out of the way, which is the case with this website. The problem I have is the amount of tracking done by this ad. Now both Google and some other company I do not recognize knows that I visited this website.

While it seems that Carbon's ad code does not allow for running arbitrary javascript, but I have no idea, nor do I want to spend the time researching if Carbon's ads do have that capability. The last thing I want when I visit a website is a random bit of javascript running on the page. As we have already seen, companies have been abusing that capability by running cryptocurrency miners (which I have a serious objection to as that is a waste of my electricity and computer resources), plus it has been possible to exploit security vulnerabilities such as Spectre.

Seems appropriate to mention here that Jason's opened the door to direct support from his fans like us: https://kottke.org/members/

Would be awesome if he saw a nice boost from the attention here!

Anyone remember the old Buzzfeed links that were on the kottke front page? They were there before "Buzzfeed" was "Buzzfeed". I always thought that was strange since back then the day they mostly just re-posted Reddit content.

I very well may be wrong, but I believe Jason helped start buzzfeed in some way.

I learned CSS by reading the source code of kottke.org and trying/failing to rebuild the nested boxes layout it once had. Love the memories. Thank you, Jason Kottke.

I'm pretty sure ive been reading it for at least 19 of those 20 years. Frequently I'll be trying to tell someone about something I saw on there to go searching and find that I read about it a decade ago. I can't think of any other site I have visited practically every day for that long.

Twenty years of writing in public boggles the mind. The sum total of the body of work is humbling and impressive at the same time. Sometimes I imagine myself doing something like this, although the fantasy quickly passes, as I have nothing interesting to say. Perhaps what we see here is another plane of existence that is inaccessible to most.

It's a matter of "Just Do It." I started my blog on December 4, 1999 [1] and now I find myself going "Oh, I wrote about that already! It was that long ago? Eeek!". [2]

[1] http://boston.conman.org/1999/12/04.1

[2] http://boston.conman.org/2018/03/06.1

Edit: added additional link

Another site of which I'm aware, Sinfest, has passed 18 years:

http://sinfest.net/view.php?date=2000-01-17

I killed my blog 10 years ago and recently brought it back to life on Medium, thanks to the Internet Archive. I applaud Kottke for keeping it up this long. It's not easy. Good luck for the next 10 years :)

Still not the website of Leo Kottke, don't care :(

Not related to http://leokottke.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com