Escaping the Walled Garden Internet With Wyrd Pages

"Sometimes the correct answer is exactly what we should not ever do" -- The Awakened Light of Tomorrow, Songs of Screaming 3

 

 So, we've all noticed that the modern day internet is different from how it was in the 90s and 00s. This isn't necessarily better or worse. Some ways is better, some ways is not

However, today's Internet is certainly quite a bit more generic than before. It feels more empty, despite it having so many more people on it

Part of that is: we no longer have really really weird websites cropping up

The jokes around REAL ULTIMATE POWER, JeffK, Bonsai Kitten and other dumb nonsense pages mostly only made sense in an environment where there were legitimate pages of people who were kind of a bit weird about stuff they enjoyed

Today, the Wonderbread Guy roams around Deviant Art asking for commissions. In the 90s and early 00s, the Wonderbread Guy would have had his own webpage where he just assumes everybody is into Wonderbread in the exact same level as he is into it, and the content continues on with that base axiom being a key portion of matters present

Now, the reason why we don't see those is that Social Media tends to hide anything that isn't part of the Social Media's own network of stuff

People also say that "you cannot get these weird pages to make you money"--but those people ignore that those pages never made people money back in the 90s and 00s. They instead cost money (well, sometimes)--and the goal was never making money

So, I guess the correct answer is to "not care if Social Media allows your weird website to be discoverable"

So much of the weird web of the 90s and 00s was only able to be found if you knew somebody who knew somebody who had a URL to said page. I think that mindset might need to return when people make their websites

If we have a sizeable return of odd webpages that are not designed to work within the parameters of what social media requires of them... then well, the methodology of social media will change

 This Blog is going to be the first step (for me)

"Just dive right in head first" -- last words of the guy found dead at the bottom of a cliff

Now, I'm not quite ready to set up my own weird website as of yet. I've got a few things I'm working on figuring out how to handle before I end up setting one up. A lot of it is mostly just me figuring out what I'd be putting onto said webpage, and how to have it so that it doesn't mess with the end user--while also not cooperating with social media

Push notifications are a "FSCK NO" for stuff being done... but having an RSS feed is something I might look into. However, figuring out how to lay out different parts as "things I've done", "news" and all the other stuff you'd see on older weird webpages is kind of something I'm thinking about. As you _CAN_ just add and add to a webpage... but that webpage eventually just collapses under everything you've added

I think the notion of people realising that they have to actually think about how they add to their wyrd pages. Which ultimately interfered with them making their own wyrd pages

In my case, I'm going to try a route of self-reflection--and then using that to determine where, how, what, why, when, etc. I put for my construction of my own Wyrd Page

As again, I more just want to avoid making it be a total mess. Disorganised, sure that is fine. The issue comes from adding to the Wyrd Page being a chore--which is not what you want when working on a Wyrd Page

Ideas to think about bringing back

"Sometimes the joy of retro, is the discovery of awkward ideas that were dropped before they could be figured out" -- Frigyth The Grumpy, Musings Before Ketchup

There are a few things that might be able to make a return, for helping out with Wyrd Page construction and dispersal. As well, there are a few hurdles that Social Media pretends to answer... but with the lack of Wyrd Pages, turns out that it wasn't a proper answer

I've already mentioned figuring out how to work RSS Feeds... and of course Atom Feeds would also need to be put into place

I think the other notion would be to look into having WebRings make a bit of a return. The issue becomes: how, exactly, does on incorporate the interface to do stuff with a WebRing into a web page gracefully? A question I've not quite figured out the answer on how to accomplish this. Something that WebRings of old also could not figure out a decent answer towards doing

Right now, I'm going to say that perhaps the least awful answer would be to have WebRings be handled by their own webpage, and you can then navigate between different webpages within the WebRings site itself--with the Wyrd Page just letting you know you can find it in various Web Rings that it is part of

I'm guessing this would involve something similar to how you can access games in Facebook that exist on another website. It would mean that the Web Ring would need to call webpages in a slightly different method than the web browser... and would also require a _lot_ stuff being incorporated into a web page that makes it more complicated

Maybe figure out how to make Wyrd Pages compatible with stuff like EMACS or Newsreader software? I dunno... part of the Internet was lost when Text Based Browsers stopped being a way to interact with it. Like... no longer having a program done up in ncurses be a way to do stuff

Ideas to Change

"Burn down the bridges that tie you to bad habits" -- The Awakened Light of Tomorrow, Songs of Screaming 27

There are a few things that will need to be done differently for doing stuff with Wyrd Pages. Largely stuff that involves translating stuff for the different levels of The Internet, that have became sedimentary layers of Cargo Cult Code

Stuff that the only reason you include it, is because it has to be there for stuff to work. No other actual functionality is gained from it. Stuff being added onto other stuff, that you should just be able to ignore the previous stuff--as it should be implied--but you still have to add that stuff

Some work has been made to reduce the need for people actually making stuff

Markdown code is the big example I am thinking about here. Though, I do intend to look at how LaTeX, POD and other answers do their stuff

There was a video about an alternative history of text that described what could be done instead of HTML for making pages. Where tags in the page are indicated wit a ~ in front of them. So a link would end up being ~a(href="page"){content}. I kind of want to see what would be required in making a parser for what I'm calling "~links" (pronounced like TID EL LEE LINKS... you know Tiddly Winks, Tidle-Links, ~Links). I am a _VERY_ long way away from doing anything with that. So if you also think it is an interesting idea... just work on doing your own stuff towards it. Chances are if you wait for me, it won't happen

But a fair amount of getting Wyrd Pages into a thing will be making it so that there is a layer that translates a reasonable text input into something that the web will not scream and complain entirely about existing. Something that will be fairly easy for people to work on and add to, using just a text editor, and maybe version control systems

This might actually work to help tie it in with the Web Ring functionality above as well

Moderation Concerns

"Yeah, fifth one today" -- moderation team chant

Now, there are a few things that happened with webpages in the 90s and 00s that might cause problems with getting Wyrd Pages as a thing

First off is defacing pages by somebody breaking in. Bit harder to deal with than on social media. I do not have an answer right yet for this

Second off is somebody copying a Wyrd Page wholesale, and then changing a few things on the Wyrd Page, to make it look like it is run by a butthole in a way that makes it seem like the person they copied it from is the source of those butthole changes. No real answer to this one, right yet

Third off is a Wyrd Page seeming to be handled by somebody who isn't a butthole--but later coming out of nowhere that they were a butthole this whole time, but only after many many other Wyrd Pages look bad for not thinking this guy wasn't a total butthole. No real answer for that one as of yet

Again, I'm doing this blog to get my writing muscles back into a thing. By posting the most hottest of shittake mushroom posts to stuff that have me being correct in all the ways a person should never be correct. I'm also reading through a bunch of books to try to relearn stuff I lost when I burned out a decade ago--on top of stuff I did not know even back then

But yeah, I do hope that in less than two years, I'll be doing stuff with Wyrd Pages. Likely many other people will be as well--enough that some term other than Wyrd Page gets used to refer to the concept