It was nothing much, the kind of things that later would find home on MySpace: music, friends, some drawings and 3d art I was making at the time, demoscene, a bit of photography, animated gifs of course. I think later on even had some java effects on it. All in all, teenager stuff.
Realizing that nobody in the world would care about my crappy art page, it was not long lived, in fact I don't even think I saved a copy in my archives. But it introduced me to this idea of the web and using it for personal spaces.
So, soon after I started another web project, this time focusing on mainstream subjects such as a teenager's view of philosophy, politics, fountain pens and lisp... This time, it was going to using cutting-edge, newfangled technology. It was going to be a blog!
Celebrity! Somehow a "famous" lisp website noticed me back in the days...And yes, that was on blogspot, where my main blog is/used to be until today!
It was truly exciting, even if in retrospect, dumb. See, the idea of keeping an online journal and sharing it is great. What's not to like. Writing - great. Journaling - great. Sharing - great. Even if you don't get any visitors, just the feeling of being part of a community, and a cutting-edge one at that, exploring the cyberspace, joining webrings... Why not?
Dumb... because, well, I already knew how to write websites, and blogspot offered... nothing. The value is zero, and it has always been zero. It had and has a crappy editor - and we already had frontpage and geocities, you didn't need to know HTML. It was not a social network. Even basic stuff like visitor count and so on had to be brought from external providers.
True, it does allow for comments, and back in the days these were a bit better, but they were never great - today they are only spam. We felt good using it, even if it was truly never good. And... we pay a price, a quite high price at that.
We got nothing, nothing of value anyways. And in return we locked ourselves in a platform - one that happens to be dying nowadays, but in general, we gave our creativity for free to an entity that gave us nothing in return.
Big whoop you say! This is the deal of the modern internet, didn't you hear? "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer - you are the product being sold". Yes, yes, I'm not that naive. There is a nuance - at least for me. The trade is not per-se bad. But it is a trade, and you have to understand how much value you are getting.
This is true for everything, really, in tech, perhaps in life. Tradeoffs. I made a few bad deals, and it's time to rectify them. Blogspot has no value. I even used to host my presentations and files on Scribd for it - and boy was that a mistake.
We should talk about Twitter and similar communities as well... But that will be for another time...
I abandoned my first blog when I started working professionally in gaming. I didn't want to have my real name associated with it as I was navigating my first jobs, and I didn't want to have to discuss with my employer the nuances of what's good to post or not on a personal, but technical blog.
Eventually the blog became "famous" enough that people knew it was me behind it, so I dropped the pretense of anonymity - but that came many years after its inception.
And here we are now. So, this is going to be my new homepage. I hope you enjoy it! It has many features Blogspot never supported, both for you as a viewer and certainly for me as a writer.
You can understand why I went with my own website instead of simply moving to the next "great for now" platform. I've looked around a bit, and found nothing that provided any value to me.
Medium is about the same as Blogspot. CoHost - I don't need to tangle my writing with the social media I use to advertise and discuss about it. Substack? I don't care about getting paid... Github pages? Why on earth?
I just want a place to share random crap.
The old blog will stay up and for a while I plan to cross-post on both. Currently, I have no plans to take the old blog down, but I have scraped its contents in a few different ways "just in case".
- Angelo Pesce, a.k.a. deadc0de on c0de517e, a.k.a. "kenpex"
Appendix:
Quirky, unprofessional web "design", wasn't life more fun when we were not using all the same cookie molds?
Yeah, the entrace featured my first car, cruising on the Salerno coast hightway, with bad Photoshop effects!
Teenage problems on display. And lisp.
Even more personal, even more random, and of course, more bad Photoshop!