Issue #1: Nostalgic low tech web design
Hello to my so far tiny number of subscribers, I appreciate you all so much and send you sparkly joy and gratitude for this coming week. Welcome to issue #1 of Old Internet People.
In case you missed the newsletter descriptive blurb, a little recap. In "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language", Gretchen McCulloch classifies those of us who were hacking clumsily around the net in the 1990s as "Old Internet People". The description resonated, even if the name rankled. So I have run with it, and will be using the newsletter to reflect on the internet as was, as well as the internet as is. (If you want to know more about me and my background in this area, there is a summary on my website).
Despite the framing device, this has absolutely nothing to do with weddings.
SOMETHING OLD
I am not good at remembering dates, but at some point in the mid 90s, my father hooked us up to the internet. He'd heard about a thing called "email", and wanted in. Our first ISP was Demon Internet, which I am surprised to find persisted until just last year. Of course, in those days, we connected via dial up modem (here, have 10 hours of dial up modem sounds for your nostalgic listening pleasure), which meant you couldn't use the internet and the phone at the same time.
And it was slow, but that said, the internet was much lighter in those days, with websites consuming far less bandwidth than they do today. I'm delighted to see a micro trend back in this low tech direction, not least because low tech tends to mean low carbon, and that's something we urgently need to start thinking about more in web development . To that end, I present this double whammy of 90s nostalgia: a webring of low tech websites . A webring! Enjoy.
Next newsletter: usenet, newsgroups and the X-Files.
SOMETHING NEW
Blog post: New site, new Wordpress stack, new newsletter, same me
On finally sorting out my miserable wordpress site, sharing my process, accessibility and trying out audio versions, finding my voice, recursive newsletter promotion
"... Before redecorating a room, you should always take extensive "before" pictures, as you will soon forget the scale and nature of transformation. However, we often fail to remember to do this, so swept up are we by the thought of change. And so, in a similar vein, I have no screenshots of how this website looked two months ago. You will have to take my word for it that it was somehow untidy and uneven and unsatisfying. I was unhappy with the layout and design and the content, the blog posts that I am proud of were too hidden, and worse, I had entirely lost control of the back end (which sounds… never mind…). So many plug-ins, so out of date, such a mess... "
Read the rest of the blog post
SOMETHING BORROWED
Things that I have been reading and thinking about. Inclusion doesn't necessarily mean full endorsement.
- A nice/awful example of why consequence scanning for unintended outcomes and behaviours is such an important part of the design process: A Nonprofit Promised to Preserve Wildlife. Then It Made Millions Claiming It Could Cut Down Trees.
- Tools for Uncertain Times from Ella Saltmarshe and Cassie Robinson. "We've used ideas from complexity thinking, to create tools that help navigate the day to day."
- Discussions of cancel culture certainly need more nuance, imho. An interesting perspective from Charlie Warzel "It's Not Cancel Culture — It's A Platform Failure." Adventures in context collapse.
- The thread that lead me to Buttondown for my newsletter . Thank you for this, T.L.Pavlich.
- I need more time to properly dig into this concept of "full stack service design" from Sarah Drummond but I like the sound of it
- An oldie but a goodie from George Oates: Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow
- We need more slack (not the app!) in our life and processes, and here's why. Sparked a proper lightbulb moment for me about why processes fail when there is insufficient contingency, which seems obvious in hindsight.
- Some potential inspiration for other bloggers from Cory Doctorow The Memex Method: When your commonplace book is a public database
- Bonus art: this incredible set of tarot cards by Suzanne Treister, part of her Hexen project.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed it, please do share it with others . And if you didn't, I welcome constructive feedback!