Reintroduction #
For those that are returning, welcome back, but I doubt there are very many of you. The software running the original site has been dead for a few years. Amusingly, I tried to revive the old site, but the upgrade process killed it completely. There was no reviving that corpse.
So why am doing this again? I needed to.
When I originally built this web site, most of social media had established itself, but they were not the monsters they are today. I had fully intended to maintain the site, but life kept making other things more important. Anyone raising a family would understand. Over time, I began using social media more and more. It felt easier to log in and do a quick post than go through the steps I had to do for my web site. Eventually, I missed a software update, and the entire thing went down. That was a mistake.
The problem with social media is the same problem that I have with the cloud, it is other peoples computers. You are trusting them to do all the maintenance and backups to keep your data and software safe. That is the risk. If something happens to the provider, you could loose all access to to your data and software. That happened to the Gentoo Linux distribution in its early years. That’s why, in my opinion, you use multiple cloud providers that do not share resources. That is not possible for social media. Each app is a little silo that it fully controls. There is no guarantee about what will happen to anything uploaded to it, how long it will remain, or if it will be available later. This is the problem that I’ve run into.
I’ve needed to gather together information about what I did in the past, and it is no longer available. The last time I was laid off, I built a Twitter search engine that showed who tweeted to most about a search subject, and it ran from my personally built data center. Since all of the professional work I had done belonged to someone else, I needed something I could show to prove I would make a good employee. Years later, I find myself trying to gather old conversations about the work, sample outputs, even the old code base. It’s gone. All of it is gone. They removed it from their servers.
It’s my own stupid fault. I knew better, and I let convenience decide over safety.
Reason for this Site #
I have several projects that I’m slowly working towards completion, and this site is the permanent and common record for those projects.
One of the problems of present social media is that a single post is easily lost in the noise. If you are trying to do something that requires a series of posts, social media which is mostly designed for one off pieces of information is not going to help your reader find the rest of the series. However, placing a convenient link at the end of the post where the entire series is already gathered together would be helpful. Additionally it doesn’t matter if they decide to clean their servers of the data. Since it is still on the web site, it can reloaded back into the social media app.
Additionally, I am an artist and a writer. I’ve never been talented and/or lucky enough to make a living at these, but I do enjoy doing it. I’ve shared it across a lot of different platforms, and almost everything I’ve shared is no longer accessible. Though I have retained a lot, some pieces are no longer available to me. I’ve sold some of my originals, or given them away as gifts. Some have gone missing. There was also a water heater that decided to fail at the beginning of a two week vacation. What didn’t get thoroughly soaked, was covered in mold. Over half of my sketch pads had to be thrown out. Putting them on the here means I won’t have to go searching for them again.
So now I am building a this site as a common place to have a permanent record of what I wish to share with the Internet.