Yeah Mon! Just give me some notepad and good old HTML code. That I Overstand and Love. I have been making websites since 1999 and over the years have had a handful of sites that I worked on for years each and brought along the way from the early internet days to the new fangled internet junk of the year 2009.
I grew up in the NES generation. I was five when I got my Nintendo and loved it all my life. I always thought though that the kids who came after me would be even better at computers then me. Because I was good at them cause I grew up in the dawn of computers. From the first 286 computer we bought for like $2,000 when I was in the sixth grade to the various others along the years, the Pentium II, oh boy! But it seems in a way that for all the speed and performance that has been improved on (and of course the price of everything has dropped down) that what has suffered is the way people look at computers. They are no longer some cool thing that requires knowledge to use and understand but just a basic building block of life today. You can't even get a hamburger at McDonalds unless there are three computers involved in the process....
But what I am getting at is the new Internet just plain sucks. And what I mean by that is that the internet used to be a collection of websites that actual people made. There was some companies website or some tv shows website or a zillon billion fan sites for every topic around, Star Wars, Motorcyclces, Fraternity Life, whatever... But they all had a person behind them more or less... Then there was eBay back when you could actually find one of a kind things like at a garage sale.. now it seems like it's just stores selling stuff for a flat rate...
But what I am really getting at is that all these new Web 2.0 or Social Media websites are really dumbing down the internet and make people think that they are actually building a website or have a website of their own. But really you have no control over that crap... You uploaded your personal information to some central database of computers and gave them your email password so they could search your address book and find all your friends... index every human on the plant into a facebook profile... all data nicely lined up... but you are expressing yourself by choosing your own profile picture... and look your old college room mate that you didn't like then just invited you to join in on a mob raid with him... now that is bonding...
meanwhile there are all these websites that used to give people free websites, like angelfire or geocities or various others... you could make your own website from a blank slate and have it be any way you wanted... but you had to have a banner ad on the top, that sucked.. did it, how many banner ads are all over the websites now... and what the hell is with hotmail? everytime I go to check my email I have to look at ads of peoples big rolls of fat and trying to sell some diet pills... so don't tell me some crappy geocities top banner was crampin your style because internet ads have gotten out of hand now... well maybe those pop up ads that kept popping up two new ads for every one you closed, those did really suck...
but to prove me point here is the bottom line. if you make your own website and take a little time to actually learn a skill like writing some basic html code then you create it and it can be however you want. all those social sites are just full of crap and actual damage relationships with real friends more then anything... why ever write someone a real e-mail (much less a freakin letter) when you can just post it to their facebook wall...... but here is my case in point - so the last couple weeks I was trying to surf the wave and pull in some more hits for my tie dye website by promoting it on the social media websites. I was using the twitter to post updates about what I was working on tie dying and I had some feeds being posted there whenever I made a new blog post or posted an item on etsy. I was working on my twitter account for about a month and went from 3 followers to like 1300 in a few weeks... then bamn, twitter decided I was spamming people and suspended my account, bamn its gone. you don't own any of the content you work on to build on these social media websites, you think you own and account and have control, not so much. seriously I was not spamming people, I sent out like tops a dozen posts a day which if you have ever used the sites gets about 30 seconds of screen time I am sure... there are tons of scumbags trying to sell every pyramid scheme and adult program around on there and they boot the Swede for hustling some tie dyes?
Well screw twitter and facebook and all this shite.
I&I am rocking the web Oregon Gangsta style with a real website that I Erik typed all myself only using Notepad and html code.
So check it out at
Peace!
http://www.madebyhippies.com
