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Resurrection.

Meta

As someone who deeply believes in keeping the archives of everything you do online, I find it forever upsetting that I deleted all my 2000s-era blog posts from the internet. My penchant back then for “starting again, but this time I’ll get it right” lead to the deletion of a whole load of my stuff. It’s so totally the opposite of anything I’d do now.

Recently, this has been playing on my mind even more than usual. And then I remembered something. A few years ago, back in 2017, I resurrected an old Red Dwarf group blog from the dead. Maybe I should do the same for all my old blog archives. I’m sure somewhere, on some old hard drive, I’ve got a copy, haven’t I? And even if I haven’t, surely the Wayback Machine has kept most of it?

So I took a look. After all, there must be some good stuff there, even if it isn’t all gold. It really would be nice to practice what I preach, and revive all my old posts for good. That has to be a worthwhile thing to do.

thursday march 31, 2005

My willy smells of Scampi Nik-Naks

:-(

Posted @ 08:19 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

You know what, never mind.

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Scrabbling.

Internet

I’ve just idly been reminded of something by John Gruber, in his piece about the book Make Something Wonderful, and the brand new font it’s typeset in:

It has occurred to me several times during this stretch how much I miss Dean Allen, and specifically, herewith, I crave his thoughts on both the typeface and the book. Re-reading for the umpteenth time Twenty Faces, Dean’s remarkably concise and compelling “survey of available text typefaces”, I was reminded that his entry on ITC Baskerville points also to Mrs Eaves, Zuzana Licko’s inspired 1996 revival (has it been that long? I will forever think of Mrs Eaves as a “new” typeface), which Dean described thus: “an interesting if mannered experiment in reviving Baskerville by aping the unpredictability of form found in letterpress text.”

And it strikes me how, five years on from the death of Dean Allen, there is absolutely no proper archive of Dean’s writing. In order to quote his thoughts above, Gruber was forced to scrabble around on the Wayback Machine. Of course, it’s amazing that the Wayback Machine exists, and gives us as much as it does. But it isn’t – and never can be – the solution to everything. Its archives are very much an imperfect, broken representation of a man who deeply cared about how websites not only looked, but worked.

It feels like he deserves a better legacy than that.

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Nightmare of an Archivist

Life / TV Comedy / TV Drama

They say moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do in your life. This is, of course, entirely correct. This is the case in triple when you haven’t thrown out enough of your old shit before you move. Finding the Donald Duck tracksuit I wore when I was ten was a low point. Actually packing it away and moving it anyway was even lower.

Also present is boxes and boxes of my schoolwork. Some of which is pretty good, and some of which is utter bullshit. Here’s a good one:

Here’s a bullshit one:

And some, well…

I presume we’re at least a couple of years away from ITV commissioning Masturbate and Shit Yourself.

Anyway, all this rubbish got loaded up into storage years ago. (We’ve been trying to move since the start of the pandemic. It’s finally happened, three years later.) And as I was idly talking to my mother the other night, she revealed that she used to have some of my best schoolwork… and a fair amount of it got chucked out when she moved to London. Not all of it. But some.

In other words: I’ve kept loads of absolute nonsense, and some of my better stuff ended up in the bin. No matter how hard you try, variants of the above will happen. Sometimes, the things you put aside to keep, are the exact things which end up being destroyed.

Including things rather more important than my dumbass schoolwork.

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Three Broken Links, Redux

Internet

Whenever I write about linkrot on the web, like I did yesterday, and like I’ve been doing for years, I occasionally get a bit of pushback. Firstly, there’s “But surely people have the right to delete their old stuff from the web?” To which my answer is simple: yes, of course they do. It’s their stuff, after all. I’m just pointing out that it might not always be such a great idea.

The second bit of pushback is trickier. “I generally agree with what you say, but do you really expect people to pay for domain names for years to keep dead projects online?”

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to refute that one. It’s a real problem. Indeed, it’s a problem I face every year, where I have to pay to keep Observation Dome (last updated July 2006) and Noise to Signal (last updated December 2009) online. Moreover, there are a fair few domains I have actually let lapse, for exactly this reason. For the first few months of Dirty Feed’s life, the site was called “Transitorized”, with the domain transistorized.org.1 I didn’t keep that registered. I simply couldn’t justify the expense, when the site never really gained any traction under that name.

Yeah, the word you’re searching for is “hypocrite”. Hey, I let my old blog fall offline as well, for that matter. I learnt from my mistakes.

So if you’ve been active online for years, and you’re the kind of person who gathers endless defunct projects with their own domains, then it can get very expensive, very quickly. I might only have two of those now, but others have more. Sometimes many, many more. This is a problem with no easy solution, and I wouldn’t like to pretend otherwise.

I will tell you what I eventually realised, though: that buying domain names at the drop of a hat often isn’t your best option, for the exact reason described above. I used to buy them all the time, often for vague projects which never really happened anyway. These days, the newest domain name I own is… erm, dirtyfeed.org, bought in 2010.2 In general, it’s often best to build yourself a place online under one name, and have it be the home of all your little projects on the web.

This can be good for pure, evil, branding purposes. You don’t have to build up a name from scratch each time. But it’s also good because it completely solves the problem above. You don’t end up owning endless domain names, costing you money long after you’ve finished a project. You simply have one, which is in constant use for whatever you’re up to.

Dirty Feed right now is usually “John writes about old telly”. But that’s not what the site actually is. Dirty Feed is really “Whatever fun thing John finds interesting”. In 20 years time, I’m still expecting Dirty Feed to be online and doing something. But what it’s doing might be something entirely different. For all I know, it’ll be knitting patterns. Regardless: one site, one name, endless projects.

Not that the above helps anyone who had a youthful penchant for buying loads of domains. The best solution if you can’t justify the expense is just to let those domain names lapse, and mirror all your old content on your current, rather-more-permanent site. Sure, all your links will break, and it wouldn’t solve the errant porn link issue I mentioned in my last piece, but it’s better than nothing.

It’s worth emphasising once more: all I really intend to do with these pieces is to inspire people to think about the issue. It’s not really about following a rigid rule of never letting your old stuff fall offline. It’s meant to be more subtle. “Are you really sure you want that to happen?” is closer to the mark.

A brilliant piece of analysis turning to dust; two decades of you changing as a person which someone found inspiring, gone; and yes, your magazine about indie video games becoming a porn site. If that’s what you actually want, then it’s your choice.

I just think there’s something to be said for a little preservation, that’s all. You never know what someone is going to find useful.


  1. What a dreadful name, incidentally. I really, really struggled with what to call this place, and it was the best one I came up with before launch, based on an old Kenny Everett line about “transistorised people”. Long, dull, confusing. The delightful double meaning of Dirty Feed is a hundred times better. 

  2. Well, technically, it’s observationdome.org, but that was repurchasing an old domain name I used to own, and then let lapse, so it doesn’t count. See here for the full story. 

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Three Broken Links.

Internet

i.
Sometimes, I randomly decide to revisit old internet dramas. Usually ones I had absolutely nothing to do with. Hey, we all need a bit of drama in our lives. I just find reading ones with nearly two decades of distance to be safer for the soul than engaging in current unpleasantness.

So it was that I decided to read up on the fuss regarding Macheist, back in 2006. The details aren’t important; you can read them yourselves if you want to. Suffice to say, it was an extremely controversial Mac software promotion. And so I went, pinging between sites, reading up on all the “latest” goss. Until I came to this, from John Gruber on Daring Fireball. A link to a piece by Buzz Andersen, described by Gruber thusly: “This is the smartest thing I’ve ever read regarding MacHeist. I wish I’d written this.”

Brilliant. So, I click on the link… and hooray, it’s broken. Luckily, I know about the Wayback Machine, so I quickly plug the link in, and what do you know, it really is the most insightful thing I’ve read about the whole Macheist affair.

The more insightful thing, yanked from the net. While other, less good takes, still survive. That doesn’t seem right, somehow.

*   *   *

ii.
When I post on here, I’ll occasionally write about someone without actually linking to their site. This is a very deliberate act. It’s usually when I want to talk about something they’ve done which I don’t like, without shining a great big spotlight on them as an individual in a way which feels unfair. With this particular example, however, I’m being ambiguous for an even better reason: this subject was only talked about in an email newsletter, and the archives of that were never publicly available. I think quoting from a private newsletter would be a dick move. So you’ll have to put up with my vague description instead.

This guy, you see, is a coder, turned novelist. They had blog archives stretching back years, decades. And over those years, they grew up, changed, and gradually became slightly embarrassed by those archives. They didn’t represent who he was today, and what he was today was a very different than who he used to be. Far better to scrub the site of those old posts, and make everything relevant to his life now.

I always thought he was wrong.

Because those archives told a story. And it was a story I found inspiring. Any given individual post might potentially be a waste of time or irrelevant, years down the line. But taken in aggregate, it told of his development from coder, to writer. A journey – yes, I did actually use that word – which I find personally relevant.

The joy of your website archives is that they aren’t front-centre of your site. As a reader, you have to specifically go and find them.1 You can still have your career as a novelist, your website can still mainly reflect you, now… but if people want to peek at what you used to be, they can. You can even put a great fat disclaimer on the pages containing your old material if it makes you feel better; I tend to think the date alone does that for you, but it doesn’t matter.

But to deliberately delete how you changed feels to me like missing the point. The change itself is surely just as interesting as the end result.

*   *   *

iii.
1st April 2014: A brand new publication Indieverse launches, featuring an interview with Luis Zuno.
17th April 2014: Game designer Shaun Inman gives an interview to Indieverse, and links to it on his blog.
18th June 2014: The final interview on Indieverse is published, with The Olivián Brothers.
February 2015: The indieverse.co domain has expired. It comes back to life by August 2015, and then by August 2020, it’s gone for good.2
2nd April 2022: Someone points out that the Indieverse interview link on Shaun Inman’s site now unintentionally links to porn.

Brilliant.


  1. It’s difficult to accidentally find yourself browsing articles from 2010 on Dirty Feed, for instance. 

  2. Possibly gone a lot longer than that; the Wayback Machine has no record of the site from March 2016 – August 2020. 

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Remembering.

Internet

Every generation discovers the same thing. As you get older, you have to deal with more and more people you know getting ill, or dying. Over the last few years, I’ve very much started to experience this.

So it was the other day, when I learnt the sad news of the death of Phil Reed. Phil was someone I’d mostly lost contact with over the last few years, though we did share some DMs a few months back about the possibility of him moving over to the UK. (A melancholic conversation all in itself, now.) But in the late 2000s, we got to know each other quite well, initially through Red Dwarf fandom, and then a little more broadly. And when I mooted the idea for a site which eventually became Noise to Signal back in 2005, he was an obvious person to get involved.

I’ve written about Noise to Signal on here before. A group blog where a bunch of friends all talked about media stuff we loved (and occasionally hated), it never quite took off, despite being published for a total of four full years until the end of 2009. In the end, we were all talking about slightly different things, and the site never quite coalesced into something that truly worked.

But that wasn’t through a lack of effort from Phil Reed, who was one of the most prolific contributors to the site, writing far more than I ever did. Phil clearly viewed the site and his work on it with some fondness; the name of his own site, Noiseless Chatter, was partly a reference to the old Noise to Signal. (Warning: his last post on that site is him saying goodbye; don’t click on that link without being prepared for it.)

Screenshot of Phil Reed's work on Noise to Signal

Which is one reason that I felt especially bad that in the aftermath of Phil’s death, Noise to Signal was actually offline. When the site closed back in 2009, I made a point of saying the archives would remain available, and indeed they did for many years. Unfortunately, I was right in the middle of changing web hosts for all my old, legacy sites, and it took rather longer than I was planning. The result: a large chunk of his work from the late noughties wasn’t available for people to read.

Luckily, I’ve managed to bodge Noise to Signal back online. It really didn’t seem like an appropriate time for any of Phil’s work to be unavailable. And the reason for that is obvious: when someone who is known for their writing dies, one way people like to remember them is by revisiting their old work. I suspect a great many of us have gone back and read some of Phil’s writing over the past week. Sure, you can coax the Wayback Machine into giving you a version of the site, but it’s inevitably a less smooth experience, and it’s also not as easy to access. I couldn’t bear the idea of people wanting to read some of Phil’s old work for the site, and not being able to do so.

Family and close friends have photos, or other, more intangible memories. But if you’ve just read someone from afar – like a great many of people did with Phil Reed’s work – your relationship with them might not be with a photo, or with a personal memory of them in real life. It might be with a slice of their brain that they put online, which you responded to… and don’t want to lose.

And all this goes beyond people wanting to read Phil’s work right now, and speaks to a wider kind of responsibility. I’ve spoken many times about how I think people should keep their own writing online, but as I’ve always admitted, that is surely a discussion you have to have in your own head. But if you’re the custodian of an archive of someone else’s work, as I have ended up being with Noise to Signal, then things surely get a lot more complex.

There is, to be clear, no legal responsibility. But surely there has to be a question of a moral responsibility to keep a dead author’s work available for people to read and remember them by. And this is a particular issue for people like me and my friends, where we have done that weird thing: write for free on the internet. A commercial book can go out of print; that has its own issues, but is a different kind of problem. Closer, perhaps, is the idea of print fanzines in decades past: but there was surely no expectation for people to keep paper copies of an old author’s work, available to send out at all times.

With the web, keeping people’s memories of someone alive through their work is easier. To be sure, there are still costs and technical issues to consider, and I’m not thrilled with the idea that in 20 years, I might still have to spend time figuring out how to keep the archives of Noise to Signal online. But it’s far more possible to do so than it was in decades past. And the idea of letting someone’s work slip offline just doesn’t feel right, when that work is one of the ways that person lives on in people’s memories. And if that sounds overblown, well, I suspect that Phil of all people knew damn well the power that words could have on somebody.

So yes: every generation discovers the power of loss as they get older. But the brand new thing for my generation is being the custodian of public things which help people deal with that loss. It’s a responsibility that none of us signed up for… but is impossible to ignore.

After all, Noise to Signal contains the writing of more than one deceased person that people might like to remember.

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Shame.

Internet

I’ve written many times in the past about how I think people should keep their website archives online. In fact I’ve talked about it to the point of obnoxiousness, and then far beyond that. About how old stuff can suddenly become found and loved, about the history of the web disappearing, about what remains of the public record, about accidentally destroying a web community, about losing memories… or simply about letting things live.

It’s all true. But today I want to talk about another reason I feel so strongly about this. A reason I haven’t really touched on before, but I think is one of the most important of all.

Take a look at this interview from 2013, with designer Frank Chimero. It’s actually worth reading in full; it touches on many interesting topics. For instance, I highly identify with this:

“I think I’m similar to a lot of other creative people in that I’m deeply uncomfortable with attention. It’s one of those things where if you gain any attention, you start to subconsciously — or maybe even consciously — make creative choices to have people stop paying attention to you. […]1

Attention creates expectations that feel like a saddle. And most horses buck the first time a saddle is put on them. It is a natural inclination. Maybe it’s immature behavior to want to shake off other people’s expectations? I don’t know. But, if I’m really honest about where I am creatively, that’s what I want to do — I just want to buck.”

This reminds me very much of when I decided I didn’t want to write about sitcoms for a while, because somebody mildly hinted that was all they enjoyed about my writing. It also reminds me that whenever this place gets attention for something beyond my usual audience – my Yes Minister piece last year, for instance – I feel a disconcerting mix of pleasure and uncomfortableness. Is my lack of a really popular article on Dirty Feed so far this year down to luck, people having less time for my nonsense as the world opens up again… or my choice?

But there’s another part of this interview which I can’t quite get on board with.

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  1. All the quotations in this article are edited a little to avoid the back-and-forth with the interviewers, which works brilliantly in the piece itself, but less well when quoting from it. I hope I’ve been fair with my edits, but it’s worth reading the full interview to capture the true flavour of the conversation. 

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,

Buried.

Internet / Meta

Dear Reader,

I try not to patronise you too much on here.1 I write the literal opposite of clickbait. While it’s lovely when something I write gets a few clicks, chasing that leads to utter madness. Writing Dirty Feed is supposed to be fun.2 However, I have to confess that sometimes an element of… calculation comes into the timing of what I publish. So it was with my collection of April Fools jokes played out in the pages of old BBC Micro magazines, published on the 1st April, because… of course that’s when you publish it. And I thought it was something that might gain some traction and find a little bit of an audience.

So I sent it out there, back in 2015. And it did… fine. Not spectacular numbers, even for this site – I thought it’d do more – but fine. I linked to it a few times on Twitter in subsequent years, updated it a little in 2017, and job done.

Until something interesting happened over this last weekend, that is. The piece got linked to in the latest b3ta newsletter. And just take a quick look at my stats for the April Fools article, especially the number for this month:

April Fool stats. April 2015: 255. November 2018: 559.

More people have just read (or at least clicked on) the piece than at any time previously. In fact, over twice as many people have read it this month than back in April 2015, when it was originally published. This was a piece designed to be linked to on April Fools Day to get a bit of interest. b3ta get hold of it just now, nowhere near April Fools and… bang.

You can never tell how stuff will end up being read. All my careful planning meant nothing.

And all this is exactly why I keep bleating on about keeping the archives of what you make online. If I’d yanked that piece offline after a year, for whatever reason, it would have lost the majority of people who ended up reading it. As it was, it was just sitting there… waiting to be discovered, and to have a little moment in the spotlight. Just a little moment – it’s not like it racked up thousands of hits. But that’s fine. I don’t need a piece to get thousands of hits.

Because I love people reading my old articles full stop. I think of Dirty Feed as an archive. What’s on the front page isn’t the most important thing about the site. It’s what’s buried in the archives which makes me happy.3 And my favourite thing is when someone tells me they’ve just spent ages in the archives, clicking around on things which looked interesting to them. I think of the site as a complete entity: the last ten posts are a tiny part of the whole.

There’s far too many things competing for people’s attention these days. Even if it’s a piece I’m really proud of, there’s no guarantee people will react to it straight away. But that doesn’t matter. It can just sit there… waiting. Some of them will be found eventually. And that’s enough.

If you found this piece and enjoyed it in 2028: hey there. I love you.


  1. I just failed with that sentence. 

  2. Although I often don’t find writing that much fun, which means I’m exactly as brilliant a writer as Douglas Adams. 

  3. I should probably do a better job highlighting some of that older stuff; the best of link in the navigation is fine, but not enough. I should get round to finishing the random selected articles feature for the front page, really. 

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Support for Serial Comes From…

Internet

When Season 1 of Serial started near the end of 20141, it inspired many serious pieces of analysis. Whether it was taking on the subject matter itself and probing further, or discussions about whether the podcast was even a moral thing to produce in the first place, the world was not exactly short of Serial thinkpieces.

I’m not here to talk about any of that. What I want to talk to is altogether sillier, so by all means click away if you’re expecting anything about the main topic of the podcast itself, about which I can offer no insight. We’re nowhere near any of that territory.

What I want to talk about is: Mail…kimp?

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  1. No, BBC News, it wasn’t 2015, which you could have figured out really quickly if you’d fact-checked that piece at all. 

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, ,

Now Weary Traveller, Rest Your Head, for Just like Me, You’re Utterly Dead

Internet / Life

Earlier this year, a well-known web rascal died.1 I didn’t know him. I didn’t even really like his writing, despite it being much lauded; I found it a little pretentious, and prone to sweeping judgements. I have no reason to write about him. His death is none of my business.

Except: I can’t stop thinking about it.

It’s gone, you see. All his writing: he deleted it from the web years ago. So when his death was announced, and people across the world went to look for their favourite posts to remember him by… they weren’t there. None of his sites were still online. Sure, people went scrabbling around on the Wayback Machine to find his stuff again, but however amazing the Wayback Machine is, it isn’t perfect at preserving sites. For a guy who cared so much about how the web looked and felt, and gave attention to every detail, to see people being forced to link to the equivalent of a dodgy photocopy was… well, a shame.

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not criticising him, and his specific situation. (There are particular reasons for this which are not necessary to go into here.) This isn’t really about him, in fact.

It just made me think. When you die, unless you were a right nasty piece of work, people will want to remember you. In years past, aside from the famous, that might only have been family and friends, gathering together and flicking through a book of photos. These days, if you live your life online, you might have people who read your nonsense who live halfway across the world. For that nonsense to just disappear into the ether means that when it comes for people to mourn… they can’t remember you in the way they would have liked. It’s the equivalent of chucking that book of photos onto a big bonfire.

When I die, I want to leave as much of myself behind as possible. Eventually, I’ll fade, as everything does. But I don’t want that to happen before it has to.


  1. I don’t need to name him; who he was is irrelevant to this post. 

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