🗿🧟

In today’s climate of exclusion, high anxiety, over thinking and over zealous self promotion, have we removed the fun element of self promotion on the web? I think we have and I am not sure when it happened. I remember the days of MySpace and learning basic HTML code to dress up my profile, trying to out do my friends with additional obscure pieces of music, photos, and clever moving texts. Then came sheep throwing facebook and twitter (when it was still fun). I know, like most things it is easy to abuse these apps and people suffered but, I don’t recall this being the majority. For some reason now, I have noticed that social media quickly descends into a cesspool. Anytime now I visit instagram, I see fights and slogans like ‘Londonstan’ and ‘London has fallen’. I come from and live in London and the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. In sections of my area, we have gang crime and one of the worst in London, though it is not as regular and prominent as I am led to believe. If you weren’t familiar with the area, you could believe this was an everyday occurrence. I am starting to digress now, back to my point as I jump off this tangent… I have built up knowledge on coding as a hobby over the past twenty years. I didn’t realise that I had quite an extensive collection of layouts in my head. I have professional friends who are obsessed with how they are seen, received and promoted online and agonise on weeks of work to produce a business site. To be fair, I have done a similar thing, with my personal blog site using Wordpress. Then getting caught up in their battle with ClassicPress and realising I prefer the later. I made the switch with my business site recently and prefer it. Wordpress especially has too many features for me and my simple brain when it comes to web development. Sometimes, I can find the process of building, frustrating and anxiety ridden. With not being able to move boxes, spending ages trying to find the code for a tiny section, failing and then living with it. Changing something in the css and it making absolutely no difference whatsoever. Uploading a plugin that is meant to give me godlike control over the site, when all it does is insist I buy the premium version and give me daily reminders. When I finally give in and buy it, it’s an utter waste of money and time. For context I spend a lot of time outdoors and I like the idea of coming back to my tent after a day of adventure or even writing and recording on the path as I go. I wanted a site and method that I could upload to, simply. The best method or device for this is my android phone. It’s efficient and effective, a good quality phone to boot. The wordpress app is all well and good and works with ClassicPress, so that’s ok but, it lacks the editing power of the desktop program. I know that’s an obvious statement. I designed a basic format of what I wanted to publish;

Then via ftp and ssh, I can upload the audio file to my server and make adjustments to the post. The idea came about when I was using the Raspberry Pi and I have been waging a battle with myself and creating posts with the title of… ‘How much computer power do you need?’ I will save that for another post, because it’s quite fun. Back to the point, using the pi, I have an RPI 5 8gb running Ubuntu and it’s great, I wondered how effective a zero W would be accessing the web via the command line with the w3m app. So I designed a site that would easily load on the zero but, then the challenge was to make it interesting (to me) via the http protocol on any other device. This is where my html and css coding came in handy, I have no interest in making this beautiful and engaging for anyone else, this process has to be fun for me. I don’t have the skills to create a cms that looks like every other website online at the moment, I wanted something that reminded me of why I got into coding in the first place. A text based site with pictures and moving parts. Also, it has to be able to load quickly using as little data as possible, when your sitting on the side of a cliff. With the help of ‘W3 schools’ as a reminder, I achieved my objective, it took the best part of a week and it was a lot of fun to do. I will look forward to using the set up on my forthcoming adventure next month. Having said all of this, I am fully aware of the appeal of using a professional grade CMS like Wordpress, ClassicPress and Medium and this is why I am here. My little site isn’t efficient enough for blogging, it’s a massive pain, to draft something in a notepad app on a small screen and then copy it on a text based template via ssh. The obvious answer is to develop my own CMS using php. That is the next step and I am working on it, with variables, strings, loops and echos. I compare myself to some people I know, who frequently use apps for self promotion and how important it is that they are seen in a certain way. There is no judgement on my part, we passed on a medium (no pun intended) without a manual and expected the next generation to use it in the same we have. They are exposed in a way we do not understand and expect them to respond the same way as us. I wish we had shown them the nuts and bolts of web building, rather than letting them think their face was more important. That is where the change occurred, with the evolution of the web and the only constant being change. Thanks for reading my ramblings.