Internet History: The Rise of the Blog

Charting the weblog's rise to global significance, from the primordial soup of the early net to the big league platforms of the mid to late noughties.

The humble blog eventually became one of the world's key information-sources.

In terms of the public attention it’s managed to grab, blogging has arguably upstaged some of the most powerful forms of entertainment on Earth. But its beginnings were humble, to the point that most of the tech industry considered it a lost cause. How things changed.

In this post, we'll take a journey back through time, to revisit and analyse the birth, tepid ascendancy and explosion of the blog, in the days before it was robbed of its role by social media, and was reinvented as a commercially-run content-marketing machine. In the days before building a successful blog required a business development manager, a multi-skilled creative team, full-stack coders, a planning division and an outreach budget. At one time, creating a blog post was no more demanding than writing a Mastodon post. No title. Just a date for a heading and a small block of top-of-the-head text.

Writers: Take the Web Offline With Lit.OTG

Pre-Released as Free Software on the AGPL, Lit.OTG could herald a new type of fightback against a surveillance industry that doesn't know when to stop.

Our trust, hope and optimism strategy has failed. It's time those door-slamming gatekeepers had a taste of their own medicine. The ingredients? One browser, one offline app, one firewall…

A page in an offline Lit.OTG Distribution, using Poplit - one of six starter themes that come with the app's initial pre-release.

The 2020s. Where the Web's entire infrastructure is under Silicon Valley's capture. Where every new "privacy tool" sits perched, by design, over an arterial data flow, breathlessly sucking in the same data-tornado as Big Tech, while its providers pretend they're not selling the spoils to the usual suspects.

There's a limit to the number of times you can watch the same bullshitters pull the same strokes before you start taking your digital welfare into your own hands. And in this environment, there's only one genuine way to stay clear of the surveillance machine. Cut the cord. Work offline.

Web Non-Standards and Other 2020s Headaches

Big Tech's grip on developer resources is so unthinkably tight that simply, new devs do not know how to build websites and apps that won't violate their users' privacy. But yeah, let's all wave our arms and spread the "Privacy is not Dead" meme.

The forthcoming content-packager app after reorganisation of the interface. In general aura it feels a bit like posting on an old-school forum, except the live preview is ever-present, and it responds instantly to changes in the Markdown. This view shows an HTML5 image block, which has SEO-viable markup and is inserted via an upload-style dialogue. Alternatively, images can be inserted via a shortcode or standard Markdown.

To keep you up to date on my forthcoming content-packager, whilst simultaneously bemoaning the state of the technological world, I'm stopping off for a quick rant on Web Standards. Far from promoting universal compatibility, as any Standards regime should, Web Standards - or Web Non-Standards, to dub them a little more appropriately - have succeeded only in making exclusion and digital dictatorship the default.

For anyone who doesn't regularly read this blog, I'm in the latter throes of building a radical desktop publishing app, which sits in the gap between a website-builder and a post-Microsoft word-processor, and is designed to take a hardline stance against surveillance giants. I've learned many things along the way, but perhaps more than anything else, I've learned that trying to maintain both competitiveness and compatibility in a piece of web-tech is near impossible. By order of ye interwebz' controlling forces.

Content-Packager Update

Take things offline and the dynamics totally change. The overheads disappear. No one needs to pay for anything. The subjugation stops, and it's Big Tech who are locked out of the party - not you.

Cyberquotes will provide a flexible means to cite interesting and funny people from ANY online platform.

In early June I documented a forthcoming content-packaging system, designed to run offline, cross-platform, with no software installation necessary. This has become a pretty serious project - for me at least - and I want no one to be in any doubt that the app is on its way. These things are fairly straightforward to codge up to an experimental standard, but crafting them into decent and widely usable apps is a lot of work for one person.

The single biggest challenge through the course of the app's development has been browsers' general reluctance to communicate with files when there's no server or authentication layer.

From the beginning, the goal with this app was to provide a real alternative to surveillance culture, rather than just whining about it on a blog. I honestly couldn't find one online platform that was a real solution. I'd dig up some tiny indie startup via Marginalia - proprietor assuring users it was all about independence and content. Then I'd find that self-same proprietor in dev land extolling the virtues of his Cloudflare CDN and talking about users like they were beads on an abacus.

Coming Soon: A Free, Serverless, Hyper-Private Content-Packager for Writers

"No installations, no server, no logins, no network connections, no command-line configurations, no technical knowledge required. Click one icon and the editor fires up in your browser - OFFLINE.

The forthcoming packager in dark mode. Write to the left-hand pane in simple Markdown, and the fully-formatted post is built as a live preview in the right-hand pane as you type. Save when you're done. Distribute as you please.

Have you noticed that the louder a tech company chants the word "privacy!", the more its products involve you connecting to someone else's computer?

Some time over the past quarter of a century, we've managed to forget that "private" used to mean "NO ONE ELSE'S BUSINESS".

Not: "No one else's business except Google, Cloudflare, Amazon, Facebook, Fastly, Github, GoDaddy, your ISP, your browser provider, three San Francisco-based 'nonprofits', and an 'independent' team of React developers in Palo Alto".

Just: "No one else's business".

Somehow, we've allowed the above collection of rampant datamongers to persuade us that in fact, "privacy" means taking everything we used to do offline in actual private, and putting it on someone else's computer. Then chucking fourteen middlemen with industrial-scale data suction pumps into the connecting passage - all of whom, of course, claim they're somehow not collecting any of the data.

The Deep-Dig History of WordPress Blog Themes

The very first WordPress theme header-tagged the post dates with greater importance than the titles. SEO killed that quaint little idiosyncrasy in one blow.

Ah, the Vertigo theme. 'Twas a rebel's choice in the landmark year of 2011. The "Hitchcock 500" font was rendered via three separate JavaScript files. They don't make 'em like that anymore!

Do you remember when WordPress.com stood high and mighty as the world's number one blogging platform? Have you ever tried to revisit some of the classic design themes that proliferated on WordPress before it morphed from the best ever blog-kickstarter into the worst ever website-builder? If so, you may have noticed that some of those oldies survived and are still deep-dig accessible, while others appear to have been completely airbrushed out of history.

Why is that? Why can you still select Twenty Eleven on WordPress.com, but not Twenty Ten? Why is it that all attempts to download oldies such as Contempt, iNove, The Journalist and Redoable Lite seem to lead to the same dead end?

Disciple Syndrome: Why We Worship Brands And How To Stop It

We need to abandon the idea of role models altogether and find new routes to personal development. The notion that here in the 2020s, you could put a savvy entrepreneur in front of a large group of naive hopefuls, and NOT end up with one billionaire and a queue outside a food-bank, is, frankly, ridiculous.

If social media has accomplished any useful Darwinian purpose, it's been to educate us in our own stupidity. One of the most sobering things social media has taught us, is that we no longer need people to be the offspring of a deity or to perform miracles in order to garner our worship. All we need them to do is:

a) Have a soapbox.
b) Agree with us.

Once they've met these two conditions, we will blindly applaud and submit to every self-serving action they take, however much we suffer in the process. A brief, demonstrational interlude...