kickscondor

There are still plenty of people who run sites on the Web like this. While I don't know many commercial static websites - I've included some favorites (philosopher.life, whimsy.space) in my list of Links of the Decade.

https://href.cool/2010s

I also do a periodic "hunt" for static websites.

https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/

Let me know if you have one, too.

I keep a similar list of sites where you can host plain text or hypertext or Web projects.

https://href.cool/Web/Participate/

If Microsoft employees are 'working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity' on HN - what do you think the chances are that they are not upvoting as part of that? (I don't know - perhaps they are secretly following some monkish creed to abstain from clicking on triangles...)

If you're curious why this run-of-the-mill PR piece is rising on HN, keep in mind that Microsoft (and other FAANG) posts like these are gamed by employees. https://www.kickscondor.com/satya-nadella-'reads''games'-hac...

Ah ok - thanks!

They mention in the article that some of the old black-and-white Superman film is stored on glass as well - but what really amuses me is that (if I recall correctly) Superman HIMSELF stores film on glass (or long crystal shards) in the 1978 film that is the subject of this article. My sister and I used to pretend in winter that icicles were our VHS tapes and we’d put them in the snow to “watch” them.

I guess I need to clarify. I don't want email summaries of blogs - that would be awful. I want websites to offer the ability to send raw RSS feeds over email as a push service.

So basically WebSub but you don't need to run a WebSub server - you could just parse feeds using, for example, a procmail script. Email is already a well-supported protocol; WebSub is not.

Original link on Meteuphoric: https://meteuphoric.com/2019/11/04/total-horse-takeover/

I'm glad to see this blog active again after a year of quiet.

Mmmm, RSS over e-mail. Is it bad that I want this?

People often cite DuckDuckGo or Reddit search as popular alternatives to Google. A few other little known ones that go well alongside Million Short:

* https://wiby.me

* https://www.mojeek.com

* Personal fave: https://pinboard.in/search/

* Also, google "<keywords> site:are.na"

Wouldn't use these necessarily for finding an answer to a programming question. More: to find unusual blogs/wikis, to search topics that are full of ad spam on Google or to just explore in the ancient practice of web surfing.

Very kind. Thank you for saying hi. Your github has some sweet projects. Love the D&D5 tldr. I need to look over your SoundCloud scraper today - I'm doing the same thing in some code and it'll be good to compare. So thank YOU in advance, Miserlou.

I keep a modern directory to the 'old' Internet at http://href.cool.

I also track what's happening on blogs and wikis at http://www.kickscondor.com.

There is a whole lot of great stuff going on, regardless of how popular it is. (I kind of think it's great that it's not.)

> multiple disconnected, pseudonymous identities

Oh I’m with you.

I see - because you "own" the people in the garden.

Sure, it’s fine if these networks exist - I understand that people like Twitter and identify with it, even if I can’t fathom it. It’s just that they all close themselves off to interoperating with the Web.

I’m not trying to make a strict decentralization argument either - it’s just this draconian closedness to the larger network. (At least we’ve been able to hang on to email - imagine if we had separate email networks!) RSS and REST were great advances - and then our good open protocols stopped or something. Thank you for reading and responding, though.

Interesting points - like the comparison to mobile phone numbers. You’d think that an open account system could provide even more visibility - because you’re not just posting on a closed network.

I think if Facebook was just an account system or just a discovery mechanism, then it could be amazing. It just sucks that every network tries to do it all - and in a closed way.

Sure - I can see why social media took hold - but that's the perspective we've been trapped in for the last decade. You can easily shake yourself free and see that these networks are just one way of arranging things (like you say - like a "city" or like tenant housing) and that they are, quite simply, shitty. :)

I mean where do we go from here? I think if you view social media positively, then you just continue down the current road - another new app icon, another dot-com, another account, some new video gimmick to go along with it - but I wonder if it's possible to shift the perspective back to the Web as the network - and protocols as the connecting tissue. I wish I could easily follow what my sisters or parents or friends are doing - but they are all on separate shitty closed networks now.

Yeah, I'm really not doing a great job here. By 'network' I mean that the Web is the network. I'm not romanticizing needing separate accounts for every topic. I'm not sure how to isolate the part that I am romanticizing from the part that I'm not. :D

I mean let's say we forked the Web before social media and simply had unified accounts for the variety of small sites we participated in. That seems like progress to me.

I appreciate you responding - I think my comment must have been too garbled - I'm not just trying to demonize business for some arbitrary anti-capitalist reason or something. What I am questioning is the nature of the network - not to get caught up in nostalgia, but at least the Web used to be comprised of an infinite variety of communities. However, generally speaking, no one will join your custom forum or community in 2019 because it's not contained in one of these networks. They've become both the hosting and the discovery engines. They are self-contained networks. I'm trying to sort out how we went from a giant, flexible network to a bunch of shittier smaller, isolated networks.

I can pull up some reasons people cite (ease of use, mobile apps, network effects) but at the same time, it feels like the sentiment of the masses acknowledges that these networks are shitty.

People always talk about the “network effects” of Facebook or Twitter - but what about the network effect of the Web itself? How has that failed so spectacularly? For a while it seemed like we took the route of competing standards that defined the network (RSS, Atom, WebSub, REST) but there seems to be no taste for any of the new connecting protocols (Webmentions, ActivityPub) that could enhance the Web’s connective tissue.

Whereas community on the Web used to be a favorite hobbyist PHPBB forum or mailing list - it’s now just a business. (Are you on Instagram or TikTok?)

When someone wants to comment, they post - not on my blog - but on their blog. If their blog supports Webmentions, my blog will get notified and I will 'syndicate' their comment - a copy will get placed on my blog. This way everyone in the conversation had copies of the entire conversation in case one blog goes down. (Does that clear it up at all?)

You certainly can export a single node - just depends on your expectations. For example, the Indieweb has already done this in a way that I find acceptable. My blog (kickscondor.com) syndicates all the comments to every post (including deeply nested ones.) And it also captures a copy of all posts that I respond to (all the way up the chain going backwards.) This is sufficient for me. No need to export anything - it's already there in my own storage. You could also say that you'd need a snapshot of the entire Internet to provide context - but that's Just unreasonable.

I think the a Web itself already has had a 'network effect' larger than that of Facebook or any individual subnetwork.

Occasionally there is a thread for this (about every 6 months) and it also happens in the comments spontaneously (such as on this post.) Here's another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362319

I try to compile the sites that people list here: https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/ I will obviously be mining this thread. ;D

Rather than extracting the text, could you just render a cached copy of the full web page? I don't see how anyone would have a problem with that. Many times you will end up missing parts of the article anyway if you try to pare it down.

While it's true that RSS has died, I'm using it more than I ever did when Google Reader was around. Many people are using Feedbin or mobile RSS readers. I've been idly working on my own RSS reader that actually answers some of your concerns. It doesn't excerpt blogs, but just gives me an overview of what's happening out there: https://www.kickscondor.com/images/fraidycat-aug2019.jpg

My problem isn't a business issue - it's that I find news feeds chaotic and want to read blogs directly - with their design and layout, focusing on the writer directly, rather than amid a pile of distractions. (To me, even Google Reader had that problem.) But I think it's cool that our separate concerns are both answered if RSS is used for notification rather than for syndication. RSS notifies my reader tool and then I can see an overview of what's happening out there when I make time to read.

I don't think we've quite explored the possibilities that RSS opened for us.

Eh, there's more to it than this. 'Basic' is also the perspective that we're really just animals working to survive. That we're all just dipshits cluttering up the world while we attempt to assemble some kind of respectable way of living. No cynicism here - I feel a real kinship to others when I'm in this mood, rather than caught up in high-mindedness - which can be fun, too, of course.

I think the fact that she terms it 'basic' rather than 'anti-intellectual' makes it less reactionary - a baseline humanity that joins all of us. I think even the term 'American anti-intellectualism' is a misnomer, considering that ancient figures such as Jesus or Buddha were in this vein - preferring terse wisdom to chains of detailed jargon. They spoke in 'basic', in a way.

I think the problem is not just the algorithm but the presentation as well. Take the dominant 'news feed' view of your network:

* Posts are each given a fixed area of the feed. They are treated much like a steam of banner adverts.

* Individuals are all crammed in the same feed, as if they are competitors for your attention.

* Individuals who post more frequently will dominate the feed. If you have someone who only posts three times a week - but it is all gold - you'll never see those posts.

Compare this to the days before RSS when you had a list of bookmarks and you checked up on websites individually. It certainly lacked the convenience of the news feed - but the reading experience was better in my opinion.

Taking the time to encourage someone is pretty sweet too. Glad you stepped out of the crowd to say hi - I'm enjoying looking through your HN comments.

True dat!

It's amusing to me that you seem to be struggling to vocalize why anyone would want a website like yours - as if a 'resume' or a 'journal' were the only reasons to keep one.

But, as a reader, I think a website like yours is like having a chance to explore that person's personality in a freeform way. The design reflects their aesthetic (similar to how fashion does for the physical form), the organization reflects their favored mental models perhaps, and the myriad of topics and links makes it a graph-like structure for a book/journal/life. It's strange to me that people question a personal website's purpose - but accept that of a coloring or sticker book. To me, that only says that our brains haven't quite caught up with how to use the medium. (Although, if you have read sites like philosopher.life, then I think you have a glimpse of what's possible.)