Personal outsider web sites

In her defense of unpolished personal websites Ana Rodrigues opined:

all I want for my personal website is to give back to the web. I want anyone, regardless of skill level, to inspect elements, understand the structure, and learn from readable code.

Splendid. Let’s take a look:

A page of dense code for a web site

Hmmm!

We should not forget that browsers will happily render a text file (someText.txt) and combined with a simple drag and drop access point like Transmit‘s Docksend it should be easy to be on the web. This was how things worked in the days of yore. Your account with an ISP came with some ‘web space’. The ISP account would put an icon on your desktop onto which you dragged your files and they automagically appeared on the web.

The punk rock scene in the UK of the late 1970s was a move against the self-indulgent, bloated excesses of established musicians and the music industry. Of course it did not last and the status quo was soon reestablished but there was a re-setting of attitudes. Perhaps one day the web will experience something similar and people will reclaim it as their own.

RIP WWW (an ongoing series)

Although lacking links Heather Burnsenthusiasm for Station Eleven piqued my interest enough to search it out. The Wikipedia page for the TV series provides a link to the “Official Website” which reads

https://www.hbomax.com/station-eleven

alas clicking this link bounced me to

https://www.hbomax.com/geo-availability

Screenshot HBO Max not available in your region.

Why are you telling me this? Was I interested in HBO Max? Did I ask when it would be available in my region? Could you just tell me about Station Eleven?

Station Eleven is available to buy in my region from Apple TV or Amazon.

I suppose the HBO message was more informative than the usual blanket:

Sorry, content is not available

Where did it all go wrong?

Andy’s blog

Alas Andy’s blog has been deleted.

Screen shot of Andy's blog home page for 18th Feb 2025

The Wayback Machine caught some of it up to 14th February. It had come in for a lot of criticism over the last few days but it was no worse than numerous other sites promoting some form of magical SEO nonsense.

It is nigh impossible to have a presence on the web these days without wrong assumptions being made about you and why you are here:

I have been a customer of theirs for over twenty years and have never had a business 🤷‍♂️.

Some of us are here simply because we find it interesting and/or fun. We are like Ivor Cutler who Paul McCartney described as occupying the quiet meandering backwaters and tributaries that fed in to the never-ending fast flow of the mainstream of the music world but into which he had no need to venture.

Others may happen upon my quiet meandering backwater but attracting crowds was never the point.