Technology – coralie's contemplations in markup

Tech mistrust or fatigue

It looks like I have tech mistrust or fatigue. Or both! On top of that, I am pretty sure I have work fatigue, which doesn’t help.

You may have tech mistrust or fatigue too if you find dubious websites (or no valid results) when you search the web even through a search engine that is not hell bent on forcing down your throat their own products or any sites or products that are paying them to do that.

I am talking about thousands of websites that look like no human is actually curating, e-commerce sites that through bad translations or dodgy coding return a selection of items so disparate that it makes you wonder just how broken their workflow is, blogs full to the brim with AI-generated images or videos that look like they are relevant but in fact are paragraphs strung together without any editorial care, or news sites that appear to mash up the same news, fake or otherwise.

The web used to be very niche at the start. I remember the time when there were directories of websites. Then the web was great for a decade or two when it enabled people with wide ranges of interests and hobbies to share information or sell their craft or wares, and when serendipity wasn’t just the proverbial prince but a king. The following web era got darker, just like its patterns, when a few big players took advantage of their dominating position and prioritised profits over meaningful and fair trade (information and wares alike).

The web era we’re in now is hell. I am talking about both the shitty monetisation popups (paywalls, auto-play ads, popins that steal your focus, etc.) or privacy and cookies banners, and the crappy content that seems to flood the entire web. I don’t understand how we are where we are. Or rather, I think I do and it makes me hopeless.

I will spare a few paragraphs and go right to the analogy: the web today is like a body of water that is so chaotic, so polluted and so unhealthy that it killed the smaller species and even the sharks are in danger of extinction.

I don’t know about you, but I am ready for the revival of directories of websites curated by people for people, and found through serendipity. How much worse will it get? I am both curious and very afraid. But also angry. And powerless. So I’m frustrated.

Are other people experiencing the same helplessness and frustration?

Or is it because “I’m in the field”, had a good handle of how it was and thus hopes for how much better it could be, that I see how fucked-up greed and narrow mindedness made the web, and all I want to do is escape?

Truth is I want to escape “the field” more often than not these days. But the field has shaped me! So I feel like I am no good in any other field. Worse, I doubt I am any good in the field itself, as I can’t keep up with trends, or understand the direction. It no longer seems like I belong. It’s a bit crazy at work with everyone busily making dents in their TODOs, not taking one moment to question the status quo, trying to please more and more stakeholders without meaning. It’s mad. I feel like a smaller fish gaping for air, dipping underwater and bobbing up and under.

I don’t know how to conclude this. So I’ll stop there.

Piwigo flop

I was super happy to find Piwigo among the available applications to install on my self hosted site managed at Infomaniak. Having already set up my blog through the same process and migrated everything from wordpress.com, I was finally going to have text and pictures in one place!

But that proved to be too complex for me or not designed well enough or perhaps bugged to the core. Sigh.

I found a workflow that although wonky did more or less work. I activated a plugin to place pictures on a map based on gps metadata. Except that Piwigo ignores or can’t read them and having to drop each picture on a map is tedious at best, or inaccurate. Grrr.

I lack the expertise to follow my geek friends’s ways and even those who documented thoroughly how they did their setup proved too complicated for me.

For a while I thought of hiring a freelance web developer to set me up but I don’t think I would understand or like the workflow. I may still ask one day!

Mostly I feel bad twice. Once because the state of the web leaves a lot to be desired, and then because it makes me realize I am dumb and I don’t like that feeling of course 🤷🏻

Flickr is really neat. I’m keeping my subscription and never mind for now that my pictures can’t be at the koalie.net domain.

Highlights: “We need to rewild the Internet”

Today I read We Need To Rewild The Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon (April 16, 2024), and below are my personal annotated highlights from it.

Subtitle of the article, to set the tone:

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

Concept of ‘shifting baselines’ which is useful in many other contexts when considering ‘change’:

As Jepson and Blythe wrote, shifting baselines are “where each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damage of the generations before.” Damage is already baked in. It even seems natural.

Rewilding vs. timid incremental fixes that afford no true progress:

But rewilding a built environment isn’t just sitting back and seeing what tender, living thing can force its way through the concrete. It’s razing to the ground the structures that block out light for everyone not rich enough to live on the top floor.

Deep defects run deep:

Perhaps one way to motivate and encourage regulators and enforcers everywhere is to explain that the subterranean architecture of the internet has become a shadowland where evolution has all but stopped. Regulators’ efforts to make the visible internet competitive will achieve little unless they also tackle the devastation that lies beneath.

Public utilities need to be recognized as such, and funded as such (including the non-profit organization I work for, W3C, which develops standards for one application of the Internet: the Web):

[Instead, w]We need more publicly funded tech research with publicly released findings. Such research should investigate power concentration in the internet ecosystem and practical alternatives to it. We need to recognize that much of the internet’s infrastructure is a de facto utility that we must regain control of.

Better ways of doing it (also, read as a pair with the concluding paragraph of the article which I labeled ‘manifesto’):

The solutions are the same in ecology and technology: aggressively use the rule of law to level out unequal capital and power, then rush in to fill the gaps with better ways of doing things.

Principled robust infrastructure:

We need internet standards to be global, open and generative. They’re the wire models that give the internet its planetary form, the gossamer-thin but steely-strong threads holding together its interoperability against fragmentation and permanent dominance.

Manifesto (which I read several times and understood more of each time):

Ecologists have reoriented their field as a “crisis discipline,” a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same. Rewilding the internet connects and grows what people are doing across regulation, standards-setting and new ways of organizing and building infrastructure, to tell a shared story of where we want to go. It’s a shared vision with many strategies. The instruments we need to shift away from extractive technological monocultures are at hand or ready to be built.

I am looking forward to a piece (or a collection of pieces) that will talk to the people in a manner that they hear this [understand it] and that moves them to make different choices.

Pretty much as I am doggedly and single-mindedly making different and sensible ecological choices for the planet, while I look forward to people being moved at last to durably do the same.

My thanks to Robin (who I know and work with) and to Maria (who I’d like to know now)!

mv wordpress.com WordPress (self-hosted)

This blog was hosted on wordpress.com in 2013-2023, and displayed at koalie.blog since 2018. This setup expires –and will close– in July 2024.

These are my notes for future me and whoever may be curious.

Blogging software

I’ve been blogging offline since 2005 (I used a local instance of Blosxom as a diary which I kept for myself via a terminal on my laptop) and online since 2006 (on my friend Amy’s blog Dullicious where I blogged as Barbie-dull for several years, and on My Opera). My previous migration in 2013 moved my blog from My Opera (which Opera shut down four months after) to wordpress.com.

All this time my website koalie.net was hosted for free on a shared server in one of the machine rooms at MIT and I could not easily get any blogging software installed, so my blog had to be separate from my website.

But last year’s infamous Gandi dick move was both a curse and a blessing. Ditto an internal decision at work that free hosting for personal websites was ending by year end as a result of W3C moving out of MIT in January 2023.

Domain name, email, Web hosting

In June 2023, Gandi announced that the free e-mail service included with domain name rental was becoming a paying subscription by year end, as well as a general increase of their prices the following month. For email, I was using 2 boxes (for me and my son), so that meant paying an extra € 115/year. So I resolved to get email elsewhere and set up a redirect on Gandi mail. For domain name rental, I had renewed it for 5 years in January 2022, so I’m all set until February 2027.

I chose to register in July a free email account at Infomaniak (more than one in fact –for me, my son, my dad), and then the day after Christmas subscribed separately for € 82,80/year the Infomaniak Web Bundle hosting plan that offers 250 GB storage, for up to 20 sites, and the ability to install and manage over 100 web applications and CMS. I’m sharing that space with a colleague of mine. In February 2027, I’ll rent the koalie.net domain name with them too.

I activated ssh and was able in minutes via rsync to move my website content from the external hard drive it lives on, onto the web hosting.

I figured I now could at last unite my blog and my website! My wordpress.com subscription for the Starter Plan costs € 42/year and the koalie.blog domain name rental costs € 22/year, so a total of € 64/year (since I signed up for it in 2018, it has cost me € 320+)

So I painlessly installed the WordPress web app on my Infomaniak space.

Exporting from wordpress.com

I was able to export a lot of my wordpress.com data (a 6.3 MB XML file once unzipped) and import it in the self-hosted WordPress app I installed on Infomaniak as a sub-domain of koalie.net: 495 blog posts and 150+ comments.

That’s not everything, though. I was dismayed that the media items aren’t part of the export. They remain hosted on wordpress.com and the blog posts that reference them continue to link to the files on wordpress.com. Similarly, themes settings and blog settings aren’t exported. Finally, all links in blog posts and pages are absolute. In my case, I had a mix of links to coraliemercier.wordpress.com (2005-2018) and koalie.blog (2018-2023).

Importing and fixing my blog

I exported my wordpress.com media items (3.06 GB for about 1300 files sorted by year and month). Then I spent many mind-numbing hours (over 80h) uploading them post by post.

In addition to adding back the media files, I wanted to write the alternative texts (wordpress.com is very bad at nudging bloggers to write any alt text and even if you think of it, the blogging workflow makes it difficult, I found), to check and fix the links (so now most if not all of my blog links start with / and don’t include the domain name), and remove all of the posts that included media from the Instagram account I deleted many years ago.

At the moment I’m using the same theme I was using in wordpress.com: Twenty Fifteen. For the theme settings and the blog settings, I put two windows side by side and compared the pages to click through the options and fiddle to replicate what I had. There are a few differences but nothing that bothers me.

It’s costly to leave wordpress.com

I used my Christmas vacation to make a dent in the massive undertaking of re-uploading my media files and then checking each post for quality assurance. That’s the first intangible cost: time.

The second cost is intangible as well: the loss of the wordpress.com network effect (ability to find new blogs from fellow wordpress.com users, and for them to find and “follow” min), and of wordpress.com’s SEO (which only can explain that my blog had consistent hits every day.)

On wordpress.com that blog had 156 subscribers, and received 46,112 views (4.6K/month on average) from 28,123 visitors. Its most popular day was April 29, 2020 with 772 views. The visits picked up near the end of 2019, so in the past 5 years, the average views were 5.3K/month.

I don’t care that much but I’m pretty sure that after 10 years of being used to these figures (however artificial they are), I will feel the difference!

Screenshot of the wordpress.com stats interface showing a grid of the total views by months and years between February 2013 and January 2024. — koalie.blog all time total views by months and years

The third cost, which I chose not to incur, is the tangible cost of redirection of a wordpress.com blog elsewhere on the Web. It costs € 13/year.

What I did instead was to trash all of my posts on the wordpress.com end and replace that blog with just one static page as homepage, and a blog post, announcing that the setup was going to expire and close in July 2024.

Category: Technology