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.

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.

Word Processing Software: Revolution Pending?

“The divide between the progress of the Internet and the progress of the word processor could not be more stark. The word processor launches to something that looks barely any different today than it looked decades ago.”

Do you remember the days of WordStar, when a mouse was just a rather timid rodent that inadvertently antagonised cats and fantasised about processed cheese? If you're too young to know what I’m rambling on about, WordStar was the premier word processor of the 1980s, and it primarily existed on computers with non-graphical operating systems.

For the majority of PC users there was no mouse. Every instruction to a PC program had to come via the keyboard. And because the era's foremost operating system - DOS - had no graphical capability, the word processor couldn't represent elements of formatting as literal variations on screen. For a given display resolution, text would always reproduce at the same size, and with the same CP437 styling. It couldn't be italicised on screen, or displayed in bold. And many PCs of the 1980s only had monochromatic monitors, so even colour-coding was off the agenda as a universal means to represent format changes.

Whilst one might imagine that word processing software would be roundly unpopular under such unconducive conditions, offices couldn't get their hands on WordStar fast enough, and sales went through the roof. The software's renowned mail merge capability linked it up with the database behemoth dBASE, and suddenly, SMEs could produce their own mailshots, run off personalised invitations, autoprint customer/client/patient reminder letters... The future had arrived.

Why I'm Ditching WordPress.com, & All Serious Writers Should Do The Same

WordPress.com is now officially a splog network, and if you haven't done so already, it's time to quit.

Screen shot of 2009's Spectrum theme on WordPress.com. At the end of the 2000s, WordPress.com was aimed squarely at bloggers, and the policy for ads on blogs without upgrades was to serve them only occasionally, with sensitive placing. It's very different today.

Welcome to Popzazzle. I'm still not sure it's the right name, but I like it more today than I did yesterday. And I liked it more yesterday than the day before that, so… Popzazzle it is.

Popzazzle will, for now at least, serve as the sequel to Twirpz, which has, for the past six or so years, been a well-visited and often groundbreaking blog exploring the social web.

WordPress.com has evolved from a serious writer's tool with a bustling community, into a sploggy wasteland which has been re-targeted towards business users.

WHY THE MOVE?

The main Twirpz blog was, and at present still is, hosted on the WordPress.com platform. But in the years since I opened that blog, WordPress.com has evolved from a serious writer's tool with a bustling community, into a sploggy wasteland which has been re-targeted towards business users. So forward from today, I'll be posting anything that would have gone onto WordPress.com, here on Blogger instead.