Closing down your website when you know the end is near

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Closing down your website when you know the end is near

14 February 2025

David M. Webb, a retired investment banker based in Hong Kong, writes about closing his website, aptly named webb-site, which he launched in 1998, on account of terminal illness:

I hope to reach 60 in August and all I want for my birthday is another one, but before I become more dysfunctional, I need to make plans for the orderly conclusion of this pro bono, loss-making work rather than leave managing it as a burden for my family. One of the few benefits of knowing that you’re dying is being able to plan the end on your own terms.

Despite being online for about the same amount of time, I’d never heard of Webb, or his website, until I read his valedictory post yesterday. What a terrible time it must be though, for him, and his family, with his illness.

His post raises some soul searching matters though. I’ve not (really) given any thought to what happens to this website after I am gone. I did get as far as seeing if my web host offered advance paid long term hosting packages, so my website survives me for at least some period of time. This was after I saw some writing on the subject about eight or nine months ago maybe.

But I just picture myself keeping on keeping on here, and hope any preservation plans will be easy to implement when they become necessary. Webb says he does not intend that his website remain online after his death. This seems a shame, especially for one that’s been around for some twenty-seven years. Instead, Webb hopes his website, and work, will live on through the Internet Archive.

Maybe that will be the case for many website owners.

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blogs, trends

If social media was all you knew, would you start a blog?

7 February 2025

Tangentially related to yesterday’s post. This is something Jatan Mehta asked a few weeks ago. It’s an intriguing question. If social media platforms, Twitter/X, Instagram, etc, had remained as they started, maintaining chronological feeds, displaying content posted by accounts a member had chosen to follow in their feed, and keeping algorithms and political whims out of the mix, then no, maybe not.

As I wrote yesterday, I was there when (the original) Twitter landed. Quite a number of people who hitherto had been blogging, eventually went all in with the micro-blogging platform. It was just so much easier, plus no financial cost was involved. After a time, many of these people completely stopped posting content on their blogs, which all gradually disappeared as domain name registrations lapsed.

So it doesn’t entirely come down to come to the presence of social media, it comes down to what suits an individual. Maintaining a self-hosted website is more effort, but, to me, feels like second nature. Nevertheless, I still had a Twitter account, and even a Facebook page (it’s still there, somewhere), as having one for your brand was once a thing. However, I always regarded these social media presences as “out posts”.

They were extensions only of my online presence; not an integral part of it. Even back in 2008, there was the risk the service might shutdown abruptly, or the administrators might pull the plug on your account for whatever reason, without warning (or recourse). To some people, going “all in” on social media seemed foolhardy. Others were obviously prepared to take their chances, in exchange for the convenience the platforms offered.

But the social media platforms have changed a lot since 2008. All the more so in recent months. Being reliant on social media platforms has become a liability for some. Even the more “indie” platforms, such as Mastodon or Bluesky, are not, for various reasons, completely risk free either. The question then of starting a self-hosted blog, after being a lifelong social media user, now seems more a matter of necessity, rather than familiarity.

Bluesky reaches 30 million members, are you excited, or not?

6 February 2025

Social media and micro-blogging platform Bluesky passed the thirty-million member mark last week. It must be an exciting time for the Bluesky founders and backers. Exciting also for members who had been looking for an alternative to the likes of Twitter/X. I say this as one of the earlier members of Twitter, which I originally signed up for in 2007 I think. At that point though, Twitter was one of a kind; it was the first of its kind. It would spawn numerous competitors, including Plurk, and Identi.ca, though few struggled to gain traction. By the end of 2009, after being online four years, with about twenty-six million members, Twitter was the place to be.

Up until that point, I’d met close to one-thousand people, many of whom knew of me through this website. But a lot were people who’d just stumbled upon my account, and wanted to connect. Here was a place that was one, big, on-going, conversation. Making Twitter friends was easy in those early days (I could say the same about blogging). Twitter seemed like a big old friendly village. But once sky-rocketing growth came — something founders and backers has been eagerly anticipating — things began to change. And that was good. For some. Good, for instance, for the Twitter gurus, those taking it upon themselves to educate the rest of us about the “correct way” to use Twitter.

And of course of influencers. I’m not exactly sure when either arrived en masse, but I’d say many had made their presence felt by 2010. I think that’s when I began to lose interest in the platform: it’d become too much noise, and not enough signal. Having said that, I kept my account going, ticking over, for another decade, then some. But Twitter was no longer that big old friendly village. And nor, of course, could it stay that way. The platform had to grow, and begin making a return for its backers. Some of the people I followed, and who followed me, became gurus and influencers. Some became both. But by then, I wasn’t really interested in them.

I’d been using Twitter for three or four years, I didn’t need someone lecturing me, especially someone who’d spent less time on the platform than I had. As for the influencers, little of what they said meant much to me. But as a platform, Twitter had matured. It was no longer the exciting, pioneering, experience it had once been. I might — if I were more of a social media power user — call Bluesky exciting, but I could never describe it as pioneering. Twitter, for better or worse, is/was the only micro-blogging slash social media platform to stake that claim. Everything else now, like it or lump it, is a case of been there, done that.

Twitter opened up the frontier, blazed the trail. Kind of like the Telegraph Road, no? Twitter built the cities and the roads between them. Bluesky, Mastodon, and whatever else, may be new, relatively new, but they are picking up were Twitter left off. Micro-blogging slash social media platforms are no longer the undiscovered country. I don’t mean to run down Bluesky in particular. Thirty-million members in two years is impressive. But I dare say there are a few gurus and influencers among that number. Maybe too many, all bringing with them more noise, and less signal. It’s enough to make me fear we’re seeing an early-stage re-run of late-stage Twitter.

I might be a member of Bluesky, and Mastodon, but late-stage Twitter is not something I want to see a repeat of. Give me, I say, a tried and true, though hardly new, personal website, any day.

That’s not a knife: iconic Australian film Crocodile Dundee gets recut

3 February 2025

The knife, the editing room knife, has recently been taken to ocker Australian film Crocodile Dundee.

Producers deemed the slapstick comedy — that swept the once Sydney Harbour Bridge rigger, and television personalty Paul Hogan, to big screen fame in 1986 — to be out of touch with the expectations of contemporary movie audiences. This necessitated a number of “considered edits”, says Garry Maddox, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald:

Updating classic films can sometimes upset fans — there was a ruckus when George Lucas had Han Solo defending himself from bounty hunter Greedo rather than firing the first shot in a 1997 special edition of Star Wars — but the long tradition of creating new versions includes Francis Ford Coppola with both Apocalypse Now and The Godfather Part III and Ridley Scott with Blade Runner.

Scenes from the film — set between the Australian outback and New York City — where Mick Dundee, AKA Crocodile Dundee, gropes a cross-dresser in a bar, and later a woman at a party, have been removed, while others have been extended. The re-edited version of the film is to be called Crocodile Dundee: The Encore Cut, and will henceforth become the standard edition of the story.

Jump scares will keep you away from websites you want to avoid

29 January 2025

TabBoo is, I think, a Chrome only extension that helps deter you from visiting websites you don’t want to see, but can’t help looking at nonetheless.

Load the desired (or undesired, as the case may be) URLs into TabBoo, and each time you go to one of the included sites, a horror movie like jump scare image will appear at random.

I don’t know about anyone, else but after looking at the demo, it struck me TabBoo might actually make seeing some websites more fun, with a jump scare image appearing unexpectedly.

Something like this is also needed for social media, to help those trying to wean themselves off doomscrolling the socials day in and day out.

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technology, trends

RSS as a W3C standard? Now there’s an idea

28 January 2025

If the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can adopt ActivityPub as a recommendation, something they did eight years ago, you have to wonder why they didn’t do the same for RSS.

Dave Winer:

The W3C should’ve gotten behind RSS long before they endorsed ActivityPub. They’re controlled by big companies who are truly scared of interop, explains why most of their proposed standards go nowhere.

One of the functions of web standards, published by the W3C, is interoperability:

W3C web standards are optimized for interoperability, security, privacy, web accessibility, and internationalization.

Interoperability, however, is also a tenet of the ActivityPub recommendation:

W3C’s role in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment. This enhances the functionality and interoperability of the Web.

We can have the ActivtyPub protocol, which has interoperability at it’s core, but not RSS, which is the same.

Group blogs as social network alternatives? A thought experiment

22 January 2025

The Verge recently published a list of social network alternatives for people disillusioned with the likes of X, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram, to consider moving to. Having built-up a network of acquaintances and followers on these channels though, I’m not sure how many people would really consider migrating. Starting over, persuading contacts to relocate, might be a step too far for some. Still, there’ll be people determined to leave certain social network platforms.

But where will they go?

The Verge list includes many of the usual suspects. Bluesky, Mastodon, Snapchat, and Discord. There’s also a few that are new to me: Spill, Trust Cafe, Spoutible, and CounterSocial. Tumblr is also suggested, and might be one of the easier-to-adopt options, as the experience is somewhat similar to that of a micro-blogging platform. But you’d still have your work cut out getting your followers to join you there. Reddit is also listed, but be aware, your content might be used to train AI bots.

Conspicuous through absence from the list though are blogs. But aren’t blogs only for one person, I hear you asking. What use then are blogs as an alternative sort of social network? While it’s true many blogs are maintained by one person, some blogging platforms, including WordPress (WP), allow individual blogs to have multiple users. These are group blogs. Someone sets themselves up as an administrator, and then invites acquaintances to join. Blog-based social networks would be similar.

Here, a member’s user page would serve as their profile page, where biographical information can be added. From there someone would be able to post content — blog posts — as if they were doing so on Facebook or Instagram. As far as I know, there’s no limit to how many users (being admins, editors, authors, or contributors) a WP blog can have. This WP Website Tools post suggests millions. I’m not sure a blog-based social network would have millions of users, but it could have a lot.

Such a setup would need to be hosted on a robust web server, capable of handling what might be heavy user traffic. This would entail cost, but if this were shared among members, it may not be onerous. It might be a small price to pay. Members of a blog-based (private) social network would no longer need to concern themselves with the whims, and rules and regulations, of a billionaire tech-bro. Nor would algorithms be a problem. Sure, it would be different. But it would be independent.

To be clear, this sort of idea is not going to be for everyone, in fact it’s not going to be for most people. Certainly not influencers (but you never know). And probably not anyone not comfortable with setting up a self-hosted blogging application (such as WP), on a web server. But on the plus side, members would be part of a social network they controlled under their own terms. These networks might need “community” guidelines of some sort, but I doubt these would need to be expansive.

Of course, anyone hoping to escape from the mainstream social networks, to a blog-based social network, would still have to convince their acquaintances to follow them over. There’s probably more questions than answers. There would be a learning curve for some people. So maybe we’re back to square one. And yes, this thought experiment of mine is WordPress-centric (since I use WP), but no doubt there are other blogging platforms with similar functionality. Still, this might be an option.

Will the good old, friendly web, of twenty years ago, stand up

21 January 2025

Enrique Rey, writing at EL PAÍS:

Like all nostalgic escapism, the myth about a world wide web before the age of sarcasm (and the dominance of big companies) where everything was more sincere and simpler is a melancholic trap. The Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann wrote that when you turn 30 you discover the ability to remember, and those who were teenagers when broadband was installed in most homes are now that age. That is why the internet has filled up with memories of itself, although, with some effort, it is still possible to find new things full of a collaborative spirit. “There is still a lot of kindness on the internet. You just have to go to YouTube and watch those videos about how to fix a specific washing machine,” says Gómez. “A lot of content is a sign of goodwill; the real Youtuber is the one who has 10 views on each video. There are a lot of sweet, practical, erratic, very strange things there, and also a lot of people helping others selflessly,” she notes.

Even though I sometimes think the web of the late 1990’s was a friendly online world.

One difference (of many) between the web of today, and that “simpler, less complicated” web of twenty-plus years ago, is the bloated noise to signal ratio, and, and, social media (and social media influencers), which are combining to choke out this friendly web, which is very much still there.

If only you know where to find it.

Rey makes no mention of indie web/small web, but if you’re seeking out that old, friendly online world of decades passed, then indie web/small web is one place where you’ll find, or rediscover, it.

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history, IndieWeb, trends

Time to replace the BMI as a measure, or otherwise, of obesity

20 January 2025

The Body Mass Index (BMI), may, at last, be about to be shown the door. Health care experts from across the world have been calling for a new means of defining obesity, according to research published by The Lancet:

We recommend that BMI should be used only as a surrogate measure of health risk at a population level, for epidemiological studies, or for screening purposes, rather than as an individual measure of health. Excess adiposity should be confirmed by either direct measurement of body fat, where available, or at least one anthropometric criterion (eg, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, or waist-to-height ratio) in addition to BMI, using validated methods and cutoff points appropriate to age, gender, and ethnicity.

It’s always struck me as an odd way to determine whether a person is of a healthy, or otherwise, weight, simply by dividing their height by their weight.

My BMI has always been in the OK zone, but I often wondered how it could useful for people who are, say, professional athletes, or front-rowers of the Wallabies. Surely their height to weight ratios would send the BMI into meltdown. I queried a past GP about this, who told me the BMI was but one tool available to medical professionals, but did not elaborate further.

I made me immediately think if there are other such measures, why aren’t they used more widely.

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current affairs, health, trends

Free Our Feeds with Bluesky and AT Protocol. But not Mastodon, ActivityPub?

17 January 2025

The Free Our Feeds project launched a few days, prompted in part by changes to fact checking and content moderation policies across Meta properties, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The goal of Free Our Feeds seems admirable, to prevent one person/entity having full control of a social media platform:

Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.

Is this desirable. While it remains to be seen what the actual outcome of the changes at Meta will be exactly, members of their social media platforms, plus those of other companies, have been ceding ever more autonomy over their user experience in recent years. But is Free Our Feeds, who seem intent only devoting resources to Bluesky, the solution?

But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech — the AT Protocol — into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.

The AT (Authenticated Transfer) Protocol was created by the Bluesky Public Benefit Corporation, just for Bluesky. Mastodon, on the other hand, is built on ActivityPub, a protocol allowing different, separate, social media channels to “talk to”, and share information with each other. And unlike AT Protocol, ActivityPub is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation.

Free Our Feeds is hoping to raise thirty-million (US) dollars over the next three years to fund further development of AT Protocol. So, should you contribute? You might want to do your homework first. Jürgen Geuter, AKA tante, is concerned about the lack of details:

It feels weird to go to the community asking for so much money without any specifics. Just vibes. Sure, Bluesky is hot-ish right now, but asking for that kind of cash should maybe come with a bit more details and plan? Thoughts about how that new entity will be governed. What the actual mission is (and “outsourcing ATProto development so Bluesky no longer has to pay for it” shouldn’t be it).

Ruben Schade, meanwhile, points to the elephant in the room:

Why is there no mention of ActivityPub, or Mastodon, at all? You know, the protocol that isn’t tied to one app? At best, this reads like not-invented-here syndrome. At worst, it’s obfuscation.

Mastodon, and ActivityPub, are mentioned by Free Our Feeds, but you have open the concealed notes at the foot of their webpage to see this.

Talking of Mastodon though, a few days ago CEO Eugen Rochko announced the transfer of “key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components to a new nonprofit organization.” This, says Rochko, will ensure the decentralised micro-blogging platform is never under the control of any single person or entity.

It could be Mastodon is the place to stay for the time being.

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