personal home (or, welcome back to the internet circa 1998)

I’d maintained a personal home page with handy links and utilities for years, but gave it up when iGoogle etc… came along. In my current attempts to withdraw as much as possible from The Allseeing Eye of Google, I’ve resurrected a personal homepage. I found a copy of my old one from 2003 on a backup CD. Oh, the ugly. It burns. So, I created a new one from scratch.

After using it for a day or so, I’m liking it a lot better than the heavy iGoogle homepage with all of the widgets and media. The source code for my page is 6K. It loads some external media, but not much. Quick. Lightweight. Personal. And no tracking by anyone, unless I choose to do a search or follow a link to a third party site.

Previously, Google learned a little bit more about me every time I opened a browser. They knew where (and when) I was. They learned what I read. They learned what I did, by tracking any clicks or activity. And they get to feed me ads for the pleasure. Now, it’s a simple, lightweight, personal page. No tracking. No ads.

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20 thoughts on “personal home (or, welcome back to the internet circa 1998)”

  1. It’s kind of interesting seeing a return to some old-school tools and techniques. Whether it’s ending of free sites at Ning or concern about Google’s information hegemony, there seems to be growing realization that so many of our free (as in beer) toys have been anything but Free (as in speech). They might be no cost, but we lose control of the knowledge we have created by making it impossible or extremely difficult to migrate our data off of a company’s servers. And in the case of Google, we lose control of the digital footprints we leave behind us.

    But the allure of no cost services online was that someone didn’t have to be (or have access and control of) a computer/web nerd. Blogging took off when people didn’t need to worry about maintaining blog software, staying vigilant of spammers or hacking Movable Type in order to tweak the functionality. I’ve done all these things and enjoyed the challenge of them but they are beyond most people’s skill level. I am concerned that a new digital divide is going to emerge with those who are at the mercy of corporate services on one side and those who are “l33t” and nerdy on the other. One side will be less in control of their online data and digital identity, and those of us on the nerdy side will be stuck configuring blog software for our family members.

    Side note – I’m curious what kind of tool you used to create your page. Pre-made template in Dreamweaver or similar GUI web page builder? Hardcore handtyped HTML in TextMate? I bet on the latter.

    1. Rob, I think more or less that there is room for non-profits to operate in that space. To provide the tools at a small fee. I don’t think the problem is the ability. I think the problem is the will to do so. It seems like modern “consumers” (who are consumers first and people second) have been so numbed perhaps by their greed, perhaps by the utility, or perhaps their morals that they don’t seem to have the will to be independent, to see through the bullshit. Recently, I think the 60s counter-culture was the first time when people actually gained some conciousness — albeit not in the most ideal way; but still some real conciousness. We need to work on that before we can accomplish anything else. The nerds can always break free at least to some extent. The problem is the rest of humanity.

      Also, some trends to be aware of are that the government is pushing a new DMCA legislation. Also, the American lobbies are out to ban open source in Canada.

      3. people don’t see the need because the “free” third party services are good enough. And they don’t have any awareness of the hidden costs that make these services “free”.

        1. Yes, utility. But it’s not limited to that, it’s this entire attitude of jumping on the bandwagon of the latest, coolest trend rather than developing a long term strategy to deal with all of this stuff; a strategy that would be rooted in some sort of morality and ideology about how to live with technology… Hence why I switched years ago to Linux and now don’t use anything but. There are a few apps that I miss that don’t have any good enough alternatives, but by and large I can do everything on my machine that I could on Windows. I never jumped on Gmail because I knew I would regret it, lo and behold. With the web the consumers expect everything to be free and pay nothing for it, and that in my mind is greed. Also, there is no sense of morality in terms of not supporting greed either. They know they are dealing with greedy corporations and tyrannical governments, and yet nothing seems to phase them from their trance with the latest, greatest most meaningless trend.

    2. yeah, mine’s hand-rolled html (via TextMate). Nothing too complex. But it would have been just as easy to build one in something like eXe or Nvu or the like, without needing to know any angle bracket doodads.

      I’d bought into the “don’t need skills. use services” angle for a long time. I think it is/was harmful. Skills are good. People should learn how to do a little DIY without being at the mercy of whatever third party services are available. This is 2010. It’s a good idea to know a bit about web development.

      I don’t see it as causing, nor as amplifying a digital divide. It’s not like people need to write code to compile and meet unit tests. It’s text. Any schlub can edit text. It’s not rocket surgery. It’s only scary if we all say it is.

  2. I’m curious what you are doing on a browser level to “withdraw as much as possible from The Allseeing Eye of Google.” I guessing Firefox (?), but are you using any particular set of extensions?

    1. Adblock
      TACO Advertising Out-opt cookie
      CookieSafe
      BetterPrivacy

      Also use that hosts file that D posted before.

    2. I’m running Safari (well, WebKit Nightly), with ClickToFlash installed. I monitor cookies daily, and delete the ones that bug me.

      I don’t like opt-out stuff because you have to ask them to let you out (which defeats the purpose) and it needs to be done in each browser, for each user, on each computer you use.

      the hosts killfile does much of the privacy blocking. the rest is behavioural – withdrawing from third party services as much as is reasonable. I’ll still use Google’s search engine, and I still use GMail for some things. But I use my own server for things that I care about.

  3. I like the look of your start page – I’ve been running one of my own forever, but it doesn’t look quite so nifty. Quick question: What are you using to check the “up” status of your servers? Thanks!

    1. the “server status” check loads the green ball image from each of the webservers I monitor. If the server is down, the image doesn’t load. I need to tweak that part to use some javascript to force it to load the image fresh each time. easy to do. just haven’t done it yet.

          1. Thanks! I eventually found somewhere that had the “ping server” snippet of PHP I thought you were using, but I modified it with your page in mind so instead of a boring “Online” or “Offline” message, it loads an image based on whether the server is up or down. I did, however, thieve the CSS to make rounded corners from you, since my image solution was much less elegant. Also, your weather provider. You can see the results at http://www.marturia.net/start.php — it looks about 800x better than before, so thanks for the kick in the pants I needed! 🙂

            1. cool! my server has fskopen blocked, and disables the PHP ping command for security reasons. So I have to fall back on the lame image-as-server-test technique.

  4. Like I mentioned on twitter, I’ve been using a hand-crafted (or, in my case, hand-smashed-together) homepage for the last 10 years, but once again Mr. Norman, you have set the bar that much higher. Nice job, some really good tricks here to make such a local html page that much more useful. I really like the idea of re-aggregating one’s delicious links back into one’s homepage, not only because returning to where we’ve just been is not an uncommon thing to do, but also because it works with the idea that immediate re-inforcement/re-exposure is one of the best way to create memory. Thanks as always for the ideas and inspiration.

    1. dude, it’s just a bit of html 😉

      I’ve added the last few items I’ve saved in Fever˚ and tweaked the rest a bit. I’m not sold on the flash content from accu-weather, but it lets me have live updating weather info from a weather station on a house along my commute. worth it.

    2. cool. I just added an icon for use as a Web App on iPhone/iPod/iPad, and set it to load full screen without chrome. Web appalicious, no approval necessary.

      update: this may be less than ideal. links to other sites (so, every link on the page) bump you back to mobile Safari rather than staying in the webapp process. Hopefully that’s fixed in OS 4.0…

  5. Thanks, D’Arcy–like Scott, I’ve used my own rudimentary links page for years, but now I’ve cribbed yours for a much more elegant solution.

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