Like a breath of fresh air comes the human created, not machine text extruded, words of Jay Hoffman’s post on The Free Web. That’s the thoughts of someone pounded out on keys, on an individual owned and managed web site, something I do not have to scrape through ads and pop overs to read.
Fresh.
I could pull about 10 quotes, but its there for you to read. Okay, I could not resist pulling the bigger chunk to quote, and Jay’s quite simple, call:
I do it because I am in awe of the web, and I believe in it as much as any person could. I believe in the open web. The universally accessible web. The free web.
Free as in a Giant Pile of Logs flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Free as in speech, as the saying goes. And that is true. Free as in beer, too though. Libre and gratis. I have freed the information, so to speak, let it out into the world. But it’s also free to all of you, without paywalls or a business model or some scheme to capture users. I actually think that second part is pretty important.
It’s not at all coincidence that the first major decision Tim Berners-Lee ever made about the web—which was his life’s work—was to make it free. Free to all and free for all. And because he did the world transformed, and I can write this to you now.
When Berners-Lee freed the web, he tied it to a promise. To make information free as well. Implicit in that promise was the idea that that information would come from all of us. That collectively, our experiences and our contributions would create a free and open web.
I think that in this moment right now, there will be others like me that are feeling restless. Wondering what they can do. And there will be things for us to do. Right now, in my little corner I’m going to add relatively small suggestion. Small, but potentially powerful.
Put something on the web. And do it for free.
bold emphasis added by me on last sentence — from https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/the-free-web/
I feel like I have been following Jay’s History of the web for longer than since 2017 but indeed, as a blog, one can find the first post. I love the web too, it’s history seems to be almost mine in tech. I can pin myself to his timeline.
- Gopher (April 1, 1991): I was exploring and running my own Gopher servers in the early 1990s at the Maricopa Community Colleges.
- BBEdit (Apr 12 1992): Noted for early support of HTML, I used it from my very first web pages and still use it today as my swiss army kknife of text editors. It has always lived up to its tagline of “software that does not suck”
- Lynx (Jul 22 1992): The text based web browser, I remember trying it on our system’s VAX computers we used for email. I was curious at hypertext but remember not being too impressed with linking from one physics document to another.
- Mosaic (Apr 21 1993): It reads like fiction, but in October 1993 while attending an event at Phoenix College, a colleague named Jim Walters literally handed me a floppy disk with the word “Mosaic” hand written on it. He just smiled and said, “Alan, you like the internet, try this”. This. Changed. Everything.
- MacHTTP (not in Jay’s timeline but is in mine). After exploring Mosaic, and learning HTML from the NCSA tutorial, I somehow got the idea to see if I could run a web server on a Mac (since I already had a gopher server). I found Chuck Shotton’s program, installed it on a Mac/SE 30, and in December 1993, I launched the first web server in the Maricopa district- see
I could go on as the rest of the history is spelled out in this here blog, but I stray from the point.
The web is enshittified, drowning in AI Slop, and rife with the debris of commercialization. But that is not the entire web. On a daily basis I still stumble across gems of the web that are made by individuals, published on their own domains or other services that enable publishing. It’s out of the spotlight, but alive.
I will keep at it mainly here, the CogDogBlog is always the center of my web attention. I will continue to post photos on flickr all licensed Creative Commons CC0. I will spin out little web trinkets, generators, bookmarklets, wordpress (lower case no trademark) themes and plugins all free. I will devote more time to editing and adding to Wikimedia. I labor to reclaim my web bones, making archives of my content that other sites have decimated. I was pleased to see I could still in one click keep my PBWorks wiki from 2005 stay right where it started.
Pretty much every thing I have created, made, stuck together with sloppy code and hand written HTML has been put out onto that free web.
Follow Jay’s lead- it’s rather simple. “There is something you can do to help the open web. Put yourself on it.” Keep it free, niche, small, quirky, human.
Featured Image: One of many of my images freely, openly shared referencing “free” The Virtuous Properties flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
@topdog Pinging @Jayhoffmann who's post set this one off (just in case trackback pings are lost)
@topdog oi this should have gone out with a #SmallWeb tag
Damn right.
The “center” of your web attention is a wonderful sentiment. We may stray away here or there, but having a home to come back to feels something like peace.
Thanks Jay. I am a bit bewildered at what is some kind of learned web helplessness that makes most people choose the path of convenience.