The First Hit is Free

Twitter methadone networks are driving me crazy.

Razorfish laid me off a year and a half ago after working there for 13 years, but I landed a new job pretty much immediately with some of my fellow victims (seriously, I was asked to join before I even rolled off the old job). We had a great team, spent a year spinning up a new digital agency, and then it ended. It was a stupid ending and if you really care, buy me a beer and I'll explain it offline. Anyway, I've been mostly unemployed since February. I had seven weeks of work back with the remnants of my old team at Razorfish back in May and June helping them meet a deadline, but other than that, I've been looking for work. The general unemployment rate is like 3.4%, but the unemployment rate for web developers is Fuck you, you really think this job we posted to LinkedIn is real? HA HA HA HA HA You're an idiot! And the demand for 61 year old web developers with 31 years of experience, more than anyone this side of Tim Berners-Lee, is like negative. With Google and Facebook and Amazon laying off all the web developers they stockpiled when the pandemic started, anyone who needs a developer has their pick, and most won't pick someone with my level of experience when they can get someone cheaper. I had planned on retiring at 62 anyway. I turn 62 in ten months. So I'm still looking because I'm still collecting unemployment insurance and the state kind of insists that you actually look for work if they're going to pay you to not work, but if I don't find anything between now and next month when it runs out I'll just say fuck it and retire. Seems to me like the best way to find a job right now is through friends anyway. I mean it's always been that way, but with all the AI/ML pre-scanning bullshit that resumes are being put through to eliminate all but a few applications and the several thousand applications for every single job out there, it's like the only way to find a job right now.

So anyway, my life doesn't have much structure right now.

I've come up with a list of things I want to do, and so far I've done exactly zero of them. One big reason is that I spend all fucking day in front of the computer obsessively checking on my Twitter methadone networks, Mastodon and Bluesky. It's not healthy. With no structure in my life, I find myself terminally online, refreshing every few minutes to get the latest three posts to show up. It's no way to live.

So at the beginning of September, I decided to do another dopamine detox. I did this back in March, and I wrote a brief something about it at the beginning of April. The stuff I wrote then still applies. Feel more present in my real life, not having my attention sucked up so much, blah blah blah.

So I've been relaxing this past month. I make breakfast for my father-in-law when he gets up in the middle of the afternoon. I talk with my mom about whatever crazy ass YouTube or TiVOed political thing she's watching (usually Colbert or The Daily Show). I'm reading books. I'm kind of taking a course about web components that I backed on Kickstarter, because hey, maybe I'll find a job where it'll be useful and I need to keep up with the latest developments in web development technology. I've been going out some mornings before the live-in parents wake up to shoot pictures. I play Two Dots and Words With Friends. I still spend more time in front of the computer than I should reading the Washington Post and Talking Points Memo and obsessing about whether the U.S. has a future as a democracy or not.

I've been checking the networks again the past few days, although without posting. It still fucks with my head.

One way I was imposing some structure on my life was posting photos on my Twitter methadone networks three times a day at roughly the same time each day. I don't think I'm going to do that any more. I'll still post photos, but not on a schedule. That was fucking me up. Participating in things like the Shitty Camera Challenge was also kind of screwing with my head. All the pressure I felt was self-imposed, but I need to stop doing it. I need to get past my self-imposed sense of obligation in regards to these networks, and if I can't, I need to remove myself from them.

As I mentioned in April, I've been online on social media networks of one sort or another for basically my entire adult life, a good 40 years now. It worked for me. And now, maybe it doesn't. I'm trying to figure that out.

Posted at 1:50 AM
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The QODOSEN DX-286 on FM: A Contrarian Opinion

Over on Mastodon, one of the social media networks I'm on (basically Twitter without the assholes), Matt Blaze mentioned that he was very impressed with the FM reception of this cheap Chinese portable receiver, the QODOSEN DX-286. I've dabbled in distant FM reception for many years, and especially the past few years gotten into serious DXing there with my Elad FDM-S3, an SDR which can record the entire FM band. The DX-286 is available on Amazon for $80. Even an umemployed semi-retired layabout like me can afford that, so I bought one.

I don't hear it.

The DX-286 has some nice features for FM, like several bandwidths that will allow you to separate closely-spaced stations. I live in the shadows of New York City, so the FM band is pretty full here, but the radio with its whip antenna does not fill the band in the way my Elad with its external antenna does. Fair enough, the Elad is a $2000 radio. But it doesn't even compete with a 30 year old GE SuperRadio II that cost me $50 30 years ago (so a lot more comparable in price given inflation). I modified the SuperRadio to have a narrower bandwidth, 150 kHz, so that I could separate WXPN 88.5 Philadelphia from more local WBGO 88.3 Newark. It does that admirably. Similarly, I can get stable reception of WHYY 90.9 Philadelphia despite the presence of WFMU 91.1 East Orange (granted, not a blowtorch like WBGO), and WMMR 93.3 Philadelphia with next door 93.1 WPAT Paterson (a strong signal here), all with the attached whip antenna. None of the Philadelphia stations are audible at all with the QODOSEN DX-286 with its whip antenna. Hell, my 40 year old Sony ICF-2001 is a hotter FM receiver than the DX-286. I bought that radio when I was living in State College, PA, in the center of Pennsylvania, and I was able to basically cover the state with it using its whip antenna, hearing stations from Pittsburgh, Wilkes-Barre, Erie, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and even Washington, DC, on a regular basis.

I have to conclude that the reputation of the DX-286 as a hot performer on FM is overblown.

Posted at 2:04 PM
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Chocolate Tuba

A couple of years ago, I registered a domain name and put up a placeholder that consisted of the site name and a photograph that illustrated it. Now that I’m not working, I took some time and actually built the site.

Chocolate Tuba is about music that crosses cultures, combines disparate genres. Two things that are great individually, but you would not expect to see them put together. And yet, they can be surprisingly delightful!

The idea here is that music that combines genres unexpectedly is like a chocolate tuba.

I built the site using Eleventy, a static site generator. My first attempt a couple of years ago was with Gatsby, but once I saw the code it generated, I discarded it. There was a lot of crud that I didn't write that was necessary for the site to operate. I didn't like that. Eleventy doesn't insist on using a particular Javascript framework like React; in fact, you don't have to use Javascript at all. I have a bit of Javascript in the build process, but the output doesn't include any all, because it simply isn't necessary. All I'm doing here is writing a little text and including an embedded YouTube video (using the no-cookies approach to embedding) of music that fits the criteria established, that the music combine two approaches or genres or cultures in a way that is unexpected and that works.

Yesterday I saw a post shared a few times on social media about how the web used to be "fun and punk and ~weird~"". Now that I have some free time on my hands, maybe I can help bring a little more fun, punk, ~weirdness~ back to the web.

Posted at 6:35 PM
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Social Media Holiday

I took the last month off from my Twitter subsitute social media networks, Mastodon and BlueSky.

It was wonderful.

These firehose-of-posts networks serve as distraction engines, sucking up my attention and making it hard for me to focus on anything else.

Social media has been part of my life for basically my entire adult life, going back to my early 20s when I spent all my time on Usenet.

It was useful to get away from it. I found myself being more present in my daily life. I took an improv class, and I didn't tell the entire world about it as it was happening.

I'm dipping my toes back in now. I don't feel like I can let myself dive in head first and go back to how I used to use these networks, though. BlueSky, in particular, annoys the fuck out of me with how its clients work, taking me to the most recent post and then forcing me to remember where I was before. That's a basic violation of the user experience need to minimize cognitive load, and it makes me want to use it less. For Mastodon, using Ivory as my client means that I can catch up at my leisure. I intend to take it up on that, only checking in a few times a day instead of switching to the program every few minutes to read the most recent three or four posts.

Social media is made up of people, and if I follow you, there's a reason I follow you. So I don't want to lose track of that. But I can't deal with the constant theft of attention. It's like having a hyperactive hyena baying in your ear every few minutes. I can't deal with that right now. Either I make social media work on my own terms moving forward, or I have to walk away.

Posted at 12:04 PM
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Buying a Digital Camera

I am buying a digital camera.

This is not a big deal for most people. It’s the default these days. You buy a camera, it’s digital.

The last serious digital camera I bought was a Canon Digital Rebel. It was 2004. I bought it because I thought that if I shot more, I could get better at photography, and I could shoot more with a digital camera than I could afford to with a film camera. The camera cost me about $1000 if I recall correctly. What I found with the camera was that I was shooting a lot more, but my photographs were getting worse. I would spray and pray, which is to say, take a lot of nearly identical images and hope one of them worked. Very few of them did. This was highlighted on a trip we took to Florida to visit my parents. We spent a day at the Kennedy Space Center. I brought my Digital Rebel, and also brought this cheap plastic camera I had found in a thrift shop in Levittown, Pennsylvania, for a dollar, a (1960s vintage original) Diana. This was before Lomography came out with their version of the camera. The battery in the Digital Rebel died after three pictures, so I was limited to just using the Diana for our visit to this iconic location. Weeks later, when I got the film developed, I was awestruck by the photos. The heyday of the space program was the 1960s, and the photos I took looked like they could have come straight from that era. I was more impressed by the photos I took with my one dollar camera than with anything that had come out of my thousand dollar camera. From that point on, I shifted back to film.

I shot for the first few years on toy cameras like the Diana. I had a Holga, a Fujipet, an Agfa Clack, a Superheadz Blackbird Fly fake TLR, and some of the goofy cameras coming out from Lomography. I also got a Lomo LC-A. Lomography’s slogan “don’t think, just shoot” worked for a little while, until it didn’t. I found myself slowing down and taking photographs more intentionally. I started to get into Soviet cameras like the Kiev 88cm and Kiev rangefinders. I got back into Polaroid, starting with my dad’s old 250 that shot peel-apart film, and getting a succession of SX-70s. The Kiev rangefinders led to me getting a couple of Contax rangefinders, one pre-war that formed the basis of the Kiev camera, and one post-war, which was the West German attempt to recreate the cameras that had been spirited away by the Soviets to Kiev. The Kiev 88 got me into more medium format cameras; we bought a Rolleiflex after seeing a documentary about Vivian Maier, and a friend gave me a Pentax 67 he wasn’t using. When New55 had their first Kickstarter, my love of Polaroid, which dated to my childhood, led me to getting into large format, first 4x5 with a Calumet CC-401, then a succession of other cameras, including a Pacemaker Speed Graphic, several Graflex SLRs including two RB Super Ds, an Intrepid 4x5, a Wanderlust Travelwide, a 5x7 Century No. 5 studio camera, and even an Intrepid 8x10 when I found a Polaroid 8x10 processor for a very good price and needed a camera to shoot that film with. I slowed way down, shot a lot less, and found my photography slowly improving.

20 years on, I found myself wondering if these changes in how I shoot would make me work differently with a digital camera. I’ve had my eye on the Fujifilm GFX 100s for the past year. All the reviews I read about it mentioned that it didn’t work for people who had a need for speed, but if you were slower and more intentional, it was a great choice. Still, $6000 for a camera? That’s way more than I’ve spent on any camera ever. Probably the most expensive cameras I’ve bought were the Graflex RB Super Ds, which I got for a steal at $500 each (one in working condition typically goes for about $1800). My Contax rangefinders, which were comparable to Leicas back in the day, went for about $225 each. For Black Friday, the price dropped significantly, down to $4400. I considered it; Laura offered to get it for me as a combined 60th birthday / 20th anniversary / Christmas present. Okay, honey, thank you sooooooo much.

The process of getting it has been a pain. I still don’t have it. I ordered the camera a week and a half ago from B&H on Black Friday. They shipped it that day, via FedEx. It got from their warehouse in Florence, New Jersey, to FedEx Newark by Friday evening, then disappeared. It was supposed to be delivered on Monday, but it never showed up. I’ve been fighting with the two companies to get them to replace the stuff I ordered, and B&H finally said they would yesterday, but they still haven’t shipped the replacement. It’s been a real pain in the ass trying to get this camera in my hands. Hopefully it ships today and I’ll have it tomorrow.

I look forward to seeing how the camera handles when I finally get it, and how I integrate it into my photography. I’ve seen film photographers who work with digital seamlesses with film, and I’ve seen others who get seduced by the ease and stop shooting film. I hope I’ll be the former.

I’ve dived into YouTube videos about digital photography in the past week and a half. I’ve been out of the loop on digital photography for a long time. It’s interesting how much work people put into it to make their photographs look like they were shot on film. The Fujifilm cameras lean into this with film simulations, and there are videos out there showing, for example, just how close their simulation of Fuji Acros film comes to the results actually shot on Acros with a film camera. I don’t know, there are an awful lot of black and white film stocks that aren’t Acros that I love to shoot, and I’m not sure that imitating them digitally is where I want to go. But for color work, it’ll be interesting. There are some things that are hard to do reliably with film that I want to try with the GFX 100s. I’m also considering ways to dirty the output of the GFX up using things like pinhole lenses. It would be fun to see if I can set the ISO high enough to make handheld pinhole snapshots with the camera.

It feels a little weird to be getting a digital camera. So much of my identity as a photographer for the past 20 years or so has been that of someone who was completely devoted to film. But I could use a new challenge. This is an experiment for me, just to see if I control the camera or it controls me. It’ll be interesting to see the results. If it doesn’t work, I could sell the camera and get that Deardorff 8x10 camera I’ve had my eye on....

Posted at 6:07 PM
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Failing to reproduce Polaroid Chocolate film

If you know the details of how Polaroid's long lost Chocolate peel apart film worked, you know that it was a combination of a color negative with black and white chemistry. My understanding is that the original use of the process was by people using 8x10 peel apart film manually combining the required pieces. I shoot 8x10 Polaroid, but the process now is derivative of the integral process, like the iconic SX-70 pictures. I figured I should see if I could recreate that film with the integral process instead of peel apart.

I failed.

For my first attempt, I should have read up on things, because I misremembered and tried using a black and white negative with color chemistry. That didn't work at all. I got a blank white frame (mostly; some of the chemistry didn't spread, so there's a brown blob in the upper right corner). Oops.

But that left me with the required materials to do the experiment correctly, with a color negative and black and white chemistry.

This also failed.

I got a picture, kind of, and as the print has aged over the past several hours, the colors that were present have migrated to a more brown look, but most of the photograph didn't develop at all. If you look closely you can kind of almost imagine what's there, but no, it's not a success.

So, for science, and to save anyone else from the trouble and expense, the new integral-based 8x10 Polaroid does not have the ability to create the classic look of Chocolate film.

It only cost me two sheets of 8x10 to find out.

Posted at 6:41 PM
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30 Years

In my office, I have an old Macintosh SE/30, the first Mac I owned myself (I used my dad’s 128 when he brought it home, which we upgraded to at Fat Mac and eventually to a Mac Plus). On the hard drive is an HTML file with a “last modified” date of June 3, 1993. That’s 30 years ago today.

I’ve been a web developer for 30 years.

When I started, there were about 70 web sites in the world. I think there were more gopherspaces than web sites at that point. I had a Sun workstation on my desk at work at the time, so when the NCSA at the University of Illinois released XMosaic at the end of April, I downloaded it and was able to browse the web the way we think of it today. More importantly, I was able to use the “View Source” menu item and look at how these pages were produced. What I found was quite similar to what I worked with every day, which was troff macros for formatting books. The troff tag .P was an exact match for the HTML P tag, for example. I’m sure I starting writing my own stuff up pretty quickly, but today is the anniversary of the earliest day I have absolute proof for. So today I mark 30 years as a web developer. I’m sure I had come across the web before that; Ed Krol came out with a book in September, 1992, called “The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog”, and I got a copy of it very early on from a bookstore in Philadelphia. Internet books did not show up in your local Barnes & Noble at the time. That book had a chapter in it about the web, and I know I spent some time using the old line mode client before XMosaic came out, but it was XMosaic that really crystallized everything. When I was a broadcasting major in college, one of my teachers, who was an executive at the university-owned TV station where I was working, told us that they expected an upcoming convergence of broadcasting, computers, and publishing. At the time, in the mid 1980s, they thought it was going to be Teletext, which was transmitted in the vertical blanking interval of TV signals. When I saw XMosaic, I recognized it as the thing that was actually going to usher in that convergence.

I remember showing my boss the web, saying that this was the future. He nodded and forgot about it. In October, when NCSA released Mosaic for Mac and Windows, another one of my co-workers showed it to him and he asked if I’d heard of it. I told him I had demoed it for him back in May. I was working as a technical writer at the time, and we started discussing the possibility of licensing Mosaic to include with the programs we were documenting as an online help system. The thing that made us decide not to was that web browsers didn’t support tables at that point, something that anyone who worked as a web developer in the late 1990s might find astonishing, as tables were the hackish way we did layouts starting in the mid-1990s (before that there was really no way at all of controlling page layout other than using header tags for typography).

Within a few months, I had transitioned from being a tech writer to making web sites full time.

In 1996, the company I worked for, AT&T, split in two, and I wound up going with the part of the company that made hardware, Lucent Technologies. I was part of a three person team that worked on the Bell Labs web site. A lot of the work was repetitive, so I tried to automate the most repetitive parts. I created a little content management system that would help me turn around press releases very quickly. It was only a local thing on my own computer rather than something I built on the server. I used a piece of middleware called Tango and ran WebSTAR as the server on my local Mac. Tango talked to FileMaker Pro and generated the pages in the format I needed, which I would then upload to the Bell Labs site. I could post a press release much more quickly than the team that ran the main corporate site. But I would up getting laid off when Lucent ran into problems when the first Internet bubble burst. I went off to work for a startup for a year, which was a long story and not a positive thing, and wound up back at Lucent a year later as a contractor, working on both the Bell Labs site, which still had most of my code but with a new look and feel, and on the main corporate site. I did that for a few more years until Lucent was swallowed by Alcatel and my services were no longer required. That was in 2008. I saw that layoff coming, and had put some money away so I could take my time and figure out what I wanted to do.

What I wanted to do was work for an agency. I had seen so many instances where agencies were assigned all the interesting projects, and the in-house developers were left with the less interesting things. I wanted to work on the interesting things. Thanks to the efforts of a headhunter I worked with, I got a job at a small agency in NYC. I’ve been in agencyland ever since, a couple of months at the first place, then 2 years at a much larger agency that was part of a traditional advertising firm, then 13 years at one of the original digital agencies that spun up in the mid 1990s when the Internet caught fire, and now with a startup agency with some of my friends who also left that digital agency recently. One of the best things about moving to an agency was that I now worked for people who knew what I did. My direct supervisors actually did the same thing I did. That was not the case when I worked in industry, and it was the cause of much frustration and ultimately of layoffs because the people I worked for didn’t know what I did.

When I discovered the web in the early 1990s, the head of the group we were part of was a brilliant computer scientist named Jim Kutsch. He was blind. He had invented a talking terminal in the 1970s for his PhD thesis that connected a speech synthesizer to a VT-100 terminal (note that this is years before the first software commonly recognized as a screen reader). He was still using it when I worked for him in the early 1990s. From the very beginning of my career, I recognized accessiblity as a potential boon and potential problem for the web. At the time, really the only thing you could do to make a site inaccessible was to not include text in the alt attribute of images. Every accessibility professional I know is groaning as they read that, because 30 years on, that’s still the most common accessibility issue. I have talked peoples’ ears off about accessibilty for my entire career. For the first 20-25 years, they nodded their heads and then went on with their business. In the last 5-10 years, things have changed. That digital agency I spent 13 years working for got sued and that drove accessibility to the top of their agenda. Still, it’s not easy, but in the past couple of years, I see signs that accessibility is really going mainstream. Libraries and frameworks like React did not originally concern themselves with accessibility. But looking at component libraries for a new project at my new job in recent weeks, I was surprised and gratified to see that a hefty percentage of the libraries I used touted the work they had done to make their components accessible. That’s a sea change. We may finally be getting back to a point where it’s possible to make a site accessible by mistake or without intention as opposed to the standard approach for the past 30 years of making a site inaccessible by mistake or without intention. I say getting back to a point because the original specifications for HTML did not include the img tag, and the web was pretty much inherently accessible until that tag was introduced.

Web development has changed dramatically over the years. When I left Lucent for the final time, I was sick and tired of working on sites that didn’t understand semantic markup, SEO, accessibility, etc. I had resisted working in NYC because of the lengthy commute, but at that point, it seemed like the only place I could find work with like-minded developers was in the city. Web development standards were changing, thanks to the efforts of things like the Web Standards Project that drove browser makers to end the browser wars, and the development of the HTML 5 standard, which is like a million pages long mainly because it describes exactly how every browser has to behave in the face of broken code, so that all browsers work the same. But the distribution of that knowledge and those practices was uneven, and hadn’t made it to the suburbs. So I went to the city to work. I would say about ten years ago, things really started to shift. Young developers may have never encountered a layout done entirely in tables at this point. There were a few years there where semantic markup and understanding what the point of new tags like article is was the hot thing. And then we moved on and that was forgotten in the excitement of confusing new approaches to web development and frameworks like Angular and React.

About five years ago I went to the staffing person at our agency and asked to be put on a project that used React, because it was clear I would need to learn it in order to stay relevant as a developer (I had been working with Angular and really didn’t want to keep going in that direction). One thing that’s been constant through the years is that as web development has changed, with every change there’s a changing of the guard to some extent. I often run into people who tell me they used to be developers. And it doesn’t surprise me. When CSS became a thing, some developers decided that the easiest course as the entire approach to developing sites changed was to move into a different part of the business. When Javascript started becoming much more important, again, some people hived off. At certain points, this coincided with a switch from the old webmaster era, where one person could understand everything they needed to know to create a web site, to what we have today where creating web sites is complex enough that it warrants having people for every specialty; SEO, user experience, visual design, project management, etc. All of these are fields that my friends who used to be developers wound up moving into instead.

Getting back to React. I’m not a huge fan. I describe React this way: Imagine that the web is a red rubber ball. Red rubber balls have a seam. If you take a sharp knife and cut half of that seam, then reach in with your fingers and flip the ball inside-out, that’s React. For a few years there, all the computer scientists flooding into web development talked about Model-View-Controller as the proper way to structure a web application. I agree. My favorite MVC framework for the web is... the web. You have this language that you use to model your data. It has limited semantics, but you can extend it to some extent (use proper HTML tags to describe the data and extend with classes and IDs). Then there’s a language that describes the view (CSS). And you have Javascript to be the controller. And most importantly, you don’t mix the three. It always amused me that people who insisted their Javascript apps follow MVC didn’t get the irony that they were violating MVC at the most basic level.

Of course, React isn’t even an MVC framework; its proponents say it’s at best the V part. But the move to putting everything in Javascript seems insane to me anyway. The web is a three legged stool. You have HTML as the first leg. If you get your HTML wrong, there’s a million page specification to ensure that the browser deals with it in the same way and you probably get what you intended anyway. It fails gracefully. CSS is the second leg. If you get your CSS wrong, browsers will ignore the part that’s wrong and just render everything else. It fails gracefully. Javascript is the third leg. If you get your Javascript wrong, the code fails completely and refuses to run. So which of these three legs are you going to commit your entire site to?

One of the bad effects of React is that a lot of good ideas about web site development went by the wayside. One in particular is progressive enhancement, the idea that you build a web site that works no matter what, then use more advanced technologies like Javascript and some of the more recent additions to CSS to make the experience better for users with browsers that support them. This approach ensured that search engines could index your site, and that errors in your Javascript wouldn’t prevent users from completing their tasks. React and other similar frameworks just kind of overwhelmed that.

That said, there seems to be something of a backlash brewing. On my current project at my new job, we decided to use a server side framework called Remix that takes code written in React and runs it on the server, then hydrates the pages so generated so they work like a single page app like a standard React approach. It’s similar to Next.JS in that sense. Remix does a lot of work behind the scenes to ensure that sites you build with it work even if the Javascript on the browser side fails, which is to say, progressive enhancement (they actually use that term on their site). I actually feel like I can use all the knowledge I’ve built over the past few years about how to build React sites to build sites that work the way they should instead of the way the industry has collectively hallucinated that we should for the past several years.

It has been an interesting 30 years. It’s been a wild roller coaster ride, with lots of ups and downs, periods of unemployment and periods of making a lot of money, periods where we get better at what we do and periods where we forget all the lessons we’ve learned over the years. It’s been a hell of a ride. I’m not going to be doing this for many more years; I was almost 30 when I started making web sites and I’m almost 60 now. But it’s been an awful lot of fun. Things are changing again. Things like ChatGPT and GitHub Cockpit are amazing. I have occasionally used ChatGPT to help write code on a couple of personal projects like the Instagram and Twitter archive sites I recently created. It is a mixed blessing. It rarely gets code right on the first try. Cockpit is somewhat better. It’s like a really smart autocomplete most of the time. And you can really work it out by writing your code as comments and see what it comes up with. Again, it’s not always right and it’s not perfect, but it’s impressive. And I think it makes me a faster coder. It’ll be interesting to see if people starting as developers today can post articles in 30 years about their experience as developers or if the machine learning bots get better enough to take over. I’m glad I won’t be doing this so much longer that this becomes an issue for me.

One of the most interesting aspects of web development has been the low barrier to entry. At the beginning, it didn’t require a computer science degree to create a web site. In a lot of ways, the professionalization of web development has been the counterattack of the computer scientists and the move to Javascript as the primary way to build a site professionally a way of installing a gatekeeping function. But it is still possible to create a web site the old fashioned way, with HTML and CSS and a server somewhere for a few dollars per month. Browsers still understand those. And if View Source is less useful than it was 30 years ago because of obfuscation and minimization, at least there are web sites out there that explain how to build a web site. The best thing about this industry has been people’s willingness to share what they know. I hope that never changes.

Posted at 7:13 PM
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I Added a Twitter Archive site to My Instagram Archive site

I started using Twitter at SXSW in March, 2007, because all my friends there were using it to coordinate what they were doing that week. After the week was over, I found it was a great way to keep in touch with the people I met there. I was no stranger to online social media; I started using Usenet 20 years earlier, in 1987, when I started working at AT&T and got access to the nascent net. I met my wife on Usenet in 1990. So while I initially resisted Twitter, SXSW turned me around on it, and I quickly became an avid participant.

And I continued to be an avid participant for most of the next 16 years.

By the end, I was getting a little tired of it. I had accumulated a list of people I was following that was slightly too large for me to keep up with, and it started to feel like the tail was starting to wag the dog. So when Racist Spice bought the company, it was like he did me a favor in giving me the opportunity to burn it to the ground and start over somewhere else.

I could characterize the people I followed on Twitter into a few categories. There were my initial follows, the people I met at web conferences like SXSW over the years; that overlapped to a large extent with people I knew in previous years from the early days of blogging, so I kind of treat them together. Then there were the journalists and political posters I started to follow at some point. Some of them were prolific posters, and a few posted so often that I eventually had to unfollow them just to keep from feeling overwhelmed. More recently, two other communities that I started to follow were film photographers and experts on Ukraine. It was a great way to keep up with what was going on in the world.

A few years ago, I set up an account on Mastodon. I participated sporadically. When Twitter was set on fire, I moved the effort I had been putting into Twitter over there. Of the four communities I mentioned, the photographers made the most effort to move to Mastodon, so the majority of the people I follow there are photographers. A few of my OG follows from blogging and conferences and web stuff have moved, but really not that many. Journalists and politicos have largely stayed on Twitter, although there are a few who have jumped into Mastodon with both feet. And Ukraine? With one exception, a guy in Canada who posts a lot of translated stuff from the Ukrainian armed forces, none of them moved. I miss the people who haven't moved. I tried to read Twitter sporadically after I stopped posting there, particularly through lists made up of the communities I mentioned, but when Twitter turned off API access for third party clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific, I stopped. Having to read Twitter through their own site is a freaking nightmare. I don't know how anyone puts up with their terrible interface.

When I stopped posting to Twitter, I downloaded the archive of my posts that they offered. Much like Instagram, they have a lot of information about you, but don't share the stuff that other people have created in response. So the archive lacks most of the context. They do include the number of retweets and likes each post got, which Instagram doesn't include, but nothing about who did them. There is a bit of context in that quote tweets are identifiable by the fact that they end with a link to the original tweet, and that reply tweets include a link to the tweet they're replying to. So that's something, and it's better than Instagram's petulant insistance that they own the community aspects of your presence. One other thing that's nice is that for shortened URLs, they include the original URL in the data, so you don't have to contact Twitter's services to decode them.

Prominent members of the web dev community that I've folllowed over the years have always made the point that you should post your content on your own sites. In that spirit, and in the understanding that Twitter may not continue to exist in its current form forever and all that effort would be lost, you can see all my posts there at https://tweets.thereisnocat.com/.

Posted at 1:00 PM
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