Big Table #10 happy new year
Hi all,
I'm back! Fell off there a little bit between some deadlines and, just, like giving myself some space and time around the election. Hurffff.....
And things have just been... busy? Anyone else feel that end-of-year crunch? If you did, I hope it settled with some time to transform into the crunch of a tasty holiday snack.
Octothorpes Update
If you read the last newsletter, you won't be surprised to hear I've been doing a lot of work on Octothorpes. If you didn't, perhaps you are suprised to see the word "octothorpes" so many times in an email. Luckily, we finally have a decent about page if you dunno what that is but want to find out.
October was a good and kind of wild month for the project! Weird Web October, which was just starting when I sent the last newsletter, was a huge success, and I'm still blown away by all the cool things people made for it. Here's a list of my favorites but you can browse all the sites people made on this little site I made.
We also got written up on two big blogs, which gave us a huge spike of traffic in one day, some snarky knee-jerk comments, and a response from the guy who many considered to have invented the concept of "tags." This was a little stressful because our secret for Weird Web October was that we had turned off security to make it work. But everything turned out OK!
Since then, Nik and I have been working on turning this little project into a Real Software Thing out in the world. As soon as WWO was over, we turned security back on and officially launched the project. It was sorta funny to do that at the moment that all the activity in October died down, but we've been getting a steady, if slow, stream of new registrations and followers on our social media accounts. You can follow us on Mastodon or BlueSky.
I also pushed my first official contribution to the main codebase -- a Webring component.
Also some people have said some things I really liked about Octothorpes:
"You've built something that has enriched a human life a little bit! That's rad as hell."
via Ludic
and
weird web october is what finally got me in the habit of checking my RSS feed reader, because it used octothorpes, a new protocol for hashtags across websites. while i don't understand how it works,3 it was really simple to use. by including a few tags on my pages, they got listed on the #weirdweboctober page. what really sold me on octothorpes is that each tag also has an RSS feed, so i was able to see new weird webpages pop up in my feed reader every day. i loved it, so i hope octothorpes catch on as a tool for discovery and community on the open web.
via Ribo.zome, one of the coolest looking websites ever invented
Looking back at doing this newsletter for about a year
I came close to sending this last month and wrote:
"I'm also in some kind of end-of-year finish-projects-before-the-world-ends slow rolling fuge, so I'm gonna keep this issue as a Octothorpes update and do another issue in a couple weeks once I get some perspective on... everything."
But instead I just worked on music a lot and had some actual vacation. I managed to get some of that perspective, including some on this newsletter. And here's what I came up with.
I've been enjoying this as space to share what I'm working on and other cool projects I think are worth checking out, and I hope you have too. At first it was going to just be a digest of what I put on the memex, and then it was going to have themes, and then it started to seem like a new thing all to itself that needed new writing instead of just a collection of things from elsewhere.
So like all of my projects, it started branching out and feeding back on itself. And that's fine, except I've realized that trying to sum it all up in one place was actually keeping me from posting things. Which is the entire reason I built the Memex in the first place -- I wanted somewhere to gather and share things of interest without trapping them on a platform or in the structure of a blog. And then I tricked myself into writing a blog with this newsletter. In thinking of Why A Newsletter, it's because I'm assuming most people don't use RSS anymore, and the only way to create a digest like that that people will read outside of a platform is via email.
Here's where I want to write a short, spirited polemic for RSS. Luckily those already exist.
And that's another problem -- I'm doing more and more work in the independent internet space, but I'm still making paintings and actually putting out writing and doing a bunch of other things, but I don't want to overcrowd this newsletter, or, on the flipside, be someone who only uses an independent web platform to talk about independent web platforms.
So that's all to say I'm going to take a break from this newsletter as-is to post a lot more on the Memex and my other sites. I have so many things that are 96% finished and Just Need to Be Posted that this will be a lot. I think 2025 is a Writing Year for me again. Big Table will return as a digest of sorts, but I'm also thinking of doing some original content, like interviewing friends working on things I think are interesting. Whatever it is, I'll update you here on this list and let you know if / when things change.
With that in mind, I'd really appreciate it if you wanted to complete this short survey.
In the meantime, here's some some classic "peculiar stuff I found"
- https://birdsinslowmotion.com/
Elvira does this new thing with her bee toy which is adorable and weird.
From the Memex:
Happy 2025 to all who celebrate,
<3
n