[HN Gopher] Kottke.org is 25 years old today
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Kottke.org is 25 years old today
Author : tambourine_man
Score : 441 points
Date : 2023-03-15 02:58 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kottke.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (kottke.org)
| uthinter wrote:
| Also a very nice shout out to my favourite show in the article :
| Halt and Catch Fire.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| One of only a few shows that actually presented tech as it
| really was in the early days. I was depressed when the show was
| finished.
| duxup wrote:
| I don't want to take away from a really good article, but I want
| to comment on:
|
| > it's now a massive, overwhelmingly corporate entity
|
| I get it, I feel similarly, but maybe like life we need to decide
| what we consume and somehow find a way to consume a more personal
| web?
|
| Find those corners / collection of sites we feel are good, and
| share?
| ar9av wrote:
| These blogs (kottke.org , memex 1.1) offer daily-ish roundups of
| links and articles they find interesting, with a short (50-100
| words) intro as to why the reader may also be interested. I don't
| like using email newsletters (my inbox is flooded enough), and
| long lists of urls is off-putting. Are there any other blogs that
| do something similar?
| flobosg wrote:
| I just remembered one in Spanish: Oink! (https://oink.es/),
| established in 2001.
| panic wrote:
| It's not exactly daily, but Leah Neukirchen's Trivium (the
| successor to the original "tumblelog", anarchaia) is a
| fantastic link-only blog: https://leahneukirchen.org/trivium/
| CyanBird wrote:
| Nakedcapitalism is the one of my choice
|
| https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/
| zem wrote:
| https://3quarksdaily.com/ is another one from way back that is
| still going strong
| nicky0 wrote:
| Michael Tsai is something of a curator of links in the Apple
| techie world https://mjtsai.com/blog/
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| I'm trying to solve the following part with
| https://newsletterify.com. Let me know if you wanna beta test
| it for free!
|
| > I don't like using email newsletters (my inbox is flooded
| enough)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://www.bookofjoe.com/
| endtime wrote:
| http://astralcodexten.substack.com does links posts like this
| once a month. Here's this month's:
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-march-2023
| simonw wrote:
| I have a link blog in my sidebar, updated every day or two:
| https://simonwillison.net
| hackernewds wrote:
| /r/all sorted by top, limit to x duration ;)
| capableweb wrote:
| All the alternatives the siblings to you have posted are also
| somewhat echo-chambers, but this is probably the worse of the
| worst when it comes to echo-chambers.
| karaterobot wrote:
| metafilter.com
|
| aldaily.com
|
| marginalrevolution.com
|
| mjtsai.com/blog
|
| boingboing.net/blog
| hombily wrote:
| Oh wow, I'd completely forgotten this site existed.
|
| I remember first stumbling across it way back in 2002, when I'd
| received a rather unusual spam email and was trying to find out
| more about its origins - turned out Kottke had blogged about it:
| https://kottke.org/02/07/an-email-from-ryan-and-jacob
|
| Quite surprised and fascinated to see it still up and running.
| Time to have a browse and see what I've missed!
| joshu wrote:
| i really should reboot memepool
| capableweb wrote:
| Please do. I do miss the times when the internet was mainly
| "weird", obscure and different things (compared to what was
| mainstream at the time), and disagreeing with others was a fun
| pastime, not something people became angry about.
| gkanai wrote:
| YES! I'll contribute again if possible.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| Oh, please do this. Memepool was the greatest thing on the web
| for a long time, and I was very happy to be an occasional
| contributor of links ..
| po wrote:
| Wow, that's a good memory! Memepool was one of my favorite web
| destinations for many years, so for that, thank you.
| matthewn wrote:
| Would LOVE to see memepool resurrected!
| kome wrote:
| happy birthday Kottke.org - such a fun little website + amazing
| editor!
| throwawayacc5 wrote:
| I've been using the Internet since the mid-90s and have never
| heard of this blog. All I see in the blog is regime propaganda
| and nothing of interest. Are there older blog posts that were
| groundbreaking for their time that I'm missing?
| thecyber wrote:
| How
| leokennis wrote:
| Absolutely adore Kottke.org.
|
| It's also crazy how you can increase the usefulness/nice-ness of
| most things just by doing them for a long time.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| It's remarkable how influential Kottke still is. I've seen a
| whole lot of stories start as a Kottke post, then get picked up
| by an online journalist and either just run as-is or even better,
| investigated and turn into a detailed article on the subject.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Ah yes, the age of blogs. Seems like yesterday you'd stumble on
| interesting blogs by people, and they would link to 20 or so more
| interesting blogs... And you could subscribe to all of them using
| RSS. And there were easy tools to subscribe to RSS feeds, and
| also publish your blog as an RSS feed.
|
| It ain't so easy these days.
| haunter wrote:
| > It ain't so easy these days.
|
| Technically nothing have changed. Plenty of RSS readers much
| more than ~20 years ago. People changed or rather the internet;
| they realized they can reach more people than writing to a
| wall. Most want an audience and you find them on Twitter,
| Youtube etc. not on your secluded site.
| cdevroe wrote:
| There are more blogs today than ever! And, RSS is alive and
| well. Come back!
| splitbrain wrote:
| Shameless plug: There are still lots of personal blogs out
| there and an easy way to stumble on them is
| https://indieblog.page/
| coppolaemilio wrote:
| I loved this one. I opened two articles and both were
| interesting. Thank you for sharing!
| capableweb wrote:
| > Ah yes, the age of blogs.
|
| > could subscribe to all of them using RSS
|
| Maybe bit nitpicky but kottke.org predates blogs, and predates
| RSS. It's "pre age of blogs".
| throw0101b wrote:
| Today, March 15, is the 23rd anniversary of the release of
| RSS 0.90:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| Kottke's about page is the perfect description of the "www
| dream". The web of human possibilities.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| I never understood what the big deal is about Kottke.org and I've
| been on the intraweb since early 90s.
|
| Not being a hater. Just never understood the passion.
|
| Maybe the appeal is he was one of the first to monetize being a
| blogger.
| zamnos wrote:
| > P.P.P.P.S. Ha, I've thought of one more thing: I've turned
| comments on for this post! kottke.org used to allow comments on
| every post, but it's been almost 8 years since the last time they
| were on.
|
| The most telling point of the post was at the very end. Gosh we
| were so young and naive. Just setup a website to accept comments
| from all over the world. How exciting! Who knows who might visit!
| And we'll learn about how people live in other parts of the world
| and all get together and sing kumbaya. Today, user generated
| content is a the golden goose that also shits everywhere and
| honks at everyone that comes through the door unless you police
| it tirelessly.
| weinzierl wrote:
| > _Gosh we were so young and naive._
|
| Yes, but coming from a world where a long-distance call cost
| you a fortune, where the only way to talk to strangers from far
| away was ham radio (or physical travel), where a message took
| days, sometimes weeks to reach the recipient, it was somewhat
| inevitable.
| officeplant wrote:
| My dad and his buddies maintained their own CB Towers in our
| rural southern back yards to get around expensive land line
| bills. Added benefit of it freeing up the phone lines access
| to the BBS we hosted for the computer savvy among the
| farmers.
| duxup wrote:
| I think part of the decision was that a busy comment section at
| the time was maybe... a dozen posts.
|
| There weren't upvotes, retweets, etc to encourage less
| desirable content, etc. The text stood on its own.
|
| We knew there could be bad things but we could handle it, if
| only because volume.
| ge96 wrote:
| viagra ads, I remember
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| LOL! I think I bought my car (used), and (I at-least want to
| believe) the Nikon D40x with TexasHoldem Ads. ;-)
| justinator wrote:
| I attended school with my main job being running Google
| Ads. $900 check every month. And then there was the money I
| made off supporting the open source app (which I wrote in
| Perl) that the website running the Google Ads was for. The
| site couldn't have been more than a few dozen pages.
|
| Good times.
| hackernewds wrote:
| huh how?
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Once upon a time, when there was no social media, but
| there were (blog)webrolls, Digg, Slashdot, etc. And there
| were quite a few personal websites. I had one and was
| happily showing off to my small group of friends while
| sipping "cutting-chai" in the suburbs of Bombay,
| strolling with a Girlfriend and taking Macromedia Flash
| exams on the spot to impress her. There was a Startup,
| Macromedia, that saw that I was pretty active writing
| ActionScript (ASFunctions mostly) to make Flash sing to
| my tunes. Bam, Macromedia sent tickets to fly to San
| Francisco, while another group invited me to speak at
| Detroit (it was then a nice city) I even got to meet the
| "father of ActionScript", and that geeky guy that
| sometimes did the Apple Watch demos.
|
| Early to mid 2000s, my website was blowing up and so came
| advertisers, and Google Adsense. I think, having a Google
| Pagerank of 7-8 helped a lot. Besides the typical, one of
| the best month I remember was when a company bought a
| bunch of Adobe' Creative Suite licenses after clicking my
| affiliate link. Btw, I did away with any form of ads by
| around 2017/2018. I never wanted my website to be
| commercially earning money but in those days, the money
| on the side helped me bootstrap my Startups and pay my
| rent.
|
| Dug up some pictures for you
|
| Earlier pampering by Macromedia https://www.flickr.com/ph
| otos/brajeshwar/albums/720575940835...
|
| And some of these other pictures should give you a rough
| idea that my site was good enough to earn not-so-bad
| money early on. Also look at the sidebar in the website,
| that is how we added the ads - just plain text with
| hyperlinks.
|
| https://www.dropbox.com/s/0pat7u9csqj8n15/brajeshwar.com-
| 200...
|
| https://www.dropbox.com/s/u0vdmv81gq8v3bi/google-adsense-
| che...
|
| https://www.dropbox.com/s/qdml3x3q68nq5ru/brajeshwar.com-
| inc...
|
| https://www.dropbox.com/s/7cshznldpaphivq/brajeshwar.com-
| ado...
|
| https://www.dropbox.com/s/5yxcy4iun17ipng/brajeshwar.com-
| com...
| rob wrote:
| Mid-2000s were a great time. AdSense and Yahoo! Ads were
| new. You had 18 year olds making $100,000/month
| practically overnight by throwing up a MySpace layout
| website (e.g., myspacesupport.com.)
| mesh wrote:
| Well, now, those images bring back a lot of memories.
|
| I was in a similar boat. My early blog made money for me
| through affiliate sales for books about Flash, which
| eventually led to me writing books on Generator / Flash,
| which led to a job at Macromedia, which led to me
| reaching out and recognizing people in the community!
|
| Miss blogs and the culture around them so much.
|
| Here are some more images of some of that Macromedia
| swag: https://flickr.com/photos/mikechambers/albums/72157
| 594191144...
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| The Macromedia suite was so cool at the time, remember be
| awed by what it could do.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Dude, you are Mike Chambers. You are one of the person
| who made one of the biggest impact in my life and career.
| Your email that fateful day inviting me to be a
| "Macromedia Champion" (or something like that in
| 2002-ish) and the eventual "Lego" invite changed my life
| and career. It was the time I was in between jobs and was
| helping out everyone everywhere with Flash problems.
|
| Man, you are making me cry. You made me sit and talk with
| the authors whose books I read to get a job, you made me
| have dinner with the people who made the software that I
| worked with.
|
| I regret never getting a picture with you, and sorry for
| sleeping out on the Halo Game night at "W" that night.
| First jet-lag experience in my life and learning to
| adjust.
|
| Edit: I think I'm mixing up the timelines but the gist of
| story remains. I do not have the email archives prior to
| 2006, and I lost all emails from brajeshwar.com, and the
| photos metadata are scrambled after a crash-recovery
| around 2006-2007.
| spoonjim wrote:
| FYI for people who haven't pieced it together, the letter
| in the photos from BRajeshwar was sent by Mesh.
| martin_a wrote:
| This is a very nice moment. Meeting each other on the
| internet after all those years. Nice.
| mesh wrote:
| It really cool to hear from you. Was excited when I saw
| your post. Such amazing times!
| pixelbath wrote:
| Wow, both you guys were (a couple of) my heroes back in
| the Actionscript days. Thanks for all you did back then,
| because it gave my coding skills a heck of a boost in my
| early career.
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| I'm guessing by hosting ads.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Today, user generated content is a the golden goose that also
| shits everywhere and honks at everyone that comes through the
| door unless you police it tirelessly
|
| Meh, some sort of good spam filter + good moderation (not of
| dissident opinion but of pure _trash_ , oneliners and other
| boring stuff) and you'll resolve most issues, at least when it
| comes to blog comments.
| stefs wrote:
| "good moderation" is hard and exhausting. it may be possible
| for your small blog with little traffic, but for something
| like kottke.org?
| capableweb wrote:
| I've personally been a moderator for communities with up to
| ~2 million users, where the main point of the biggest
| community was discussions around subjects that are
| generally taboo in society, so it attracts a lot of low-
| effort posts for sure. On average, the community had at
| least ~50K members online at any given time, if there is
| some big news that number increased a lot.
|
| And we managed to moderate it well. Granted, the community
| has ~100 moderators who are all doing it in their free-
| time, but with the right tooling and the right
| guidelines/rules, moderation is not impossible. It's just
| really hard to get right.
| interactivecode wrote:
| Moderation is real continued work, not something you can
| do once and solve. Putting up an real life event at any
| size requires moderation or guiding the visitors. I don't
| know why people in tech continue to be surprised about
| having to take care of their audience.
| zamnos wrote:
| There's taking care of your audience, and then there's
| discovering that not only are there some salespeople in
| your audience, trying to move v1xagra and c1alis, no that
| basically benign. It's that theres a mentally disturbed
| person going around, shitting on your digital walls and
| yelling at your other users. There's a digital gunman in
| your audience trying take your users hostage with
| ransomware. Which, I mean, after Columbine, the foiled
| shooting at De Anza College, Sandy Hook, the Mandalay Bay
| shooting, among far too many others; after those events
| IRL maybe I shouldn't be surprised when my site gets
| probed yet again for WordPress vulnerabilities, but (and
| my naivety is showing once again) in looking back from
| 2023, and comparing it to 1998 pre-Columbine kotte.org
| through my rose colored glasses, it's hard not to feel
| that something's _wrong_. I don 't have to police the
| people I let into my house for them shitting on the
| walls, why is it so normal digitally and just accepted as
| the cost of doing business?
|
| Most recently, the author of the basement community site
| documented their dealings with some when their site got
| popular, which included someone(s) of an anti-social
| bent. The cynic in me saw that coming from miles away so
| it's no longer a surprise, but in reflecting about 25
| years of Kottke.org, actually, yeah it is.
|
| https://basementcommunity.bearblog.dev/things-i-learned/
|
| (posted here at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35132223)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >it may be possible for your small blog with little
| traffic...
|
| Indeed, it is possible. My blog (pretty much unchanged in
| format since 2004) gets around 500 page views/day and
| averages +-10 comments/week. Just right, small enough that
| I can respond personally to comments.
| macrael wrote:
| I recommend reading these comments! they are so heartwarming
| EA wrote:
| His font 'Silkscreen' was a hit. It was clean, tiny, and free and
| found all over the web in the early 2000's. I see it from time to
| time in various places.
|
| https://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/
| traeregan wrote:
| +1 thanks for this.
|
| I was obsessed with pixel fonts for most of the early 2000s,
| and I found Jason's website because of Silkscreen.
|
| This really takes me back:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20010603232545/https://kottke.or...
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Wow it's been a long time. This post inspired me to pull my
| trusty rss reader out of the dustbin and add a couple of feeds. I
| used to have lots of feeds and it was the main source of web
| content but somehow that all fell away over the years.
|
| The problem is that there is a deluge of content out there and I
| have less time to consume it than I did back when kottke and
| others started. I'll subscribe to something and never have time
| to get back to it. It's like buying books and never being able to
| read them (another "hobby" of mine). Maybe one day "when I
| retire" (if I'm lucky enough). Maybe if I had only one interest
| it would work but I've always been interested in so many things--
| there's so much out there that's fascinating! It's a dilemma I
| don't know my way out of.
| macrael wrote:
| I'm not even done with it but I can't recommend enough Kottke
| getting interviewed by John Gruber on The Talk Show this week.
| It's a fun trip down memory lane hearing them talk about the
| beginning of the web as we know it. No one knew what a blog was
| yet and they were there figuring out what the web was for in the
| time before mega corps moved in. Kicked up a lot of nostalgia in
| me. I still read Kottke.org pretty much every day, I like his
| taste in internet.
|
| https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2023/03/11/ep-370
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| That episode really drilled home how old the web is. Even in
| the early days of building it, I was thinking "there's going to
| be a generation that never knew a time before the web," and I
| was ready to deal with children from that mindset, but at year
| 25 we've got adults actually working now. Just amazing.
| codethief wrote:
| "I like your taste in internet" - Thanks, I will add this
| expression to my repertoire.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| how come i've never heard of this site? I feel out of the loop
| shp0ngle wrote:
| It's one of the early waves of blogs, popular on the early
| internet. I don't think it was really "relevant"/popular in the
| last 5-10 years, but I might be wrong.
| shellac wrote:
| > popular on the early internet
|
| Popular on the early(ish) web. The equivalent for the
| internet would be .plan files, perhaps?
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I should have said "web" and not "internet", yeah.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| I had to tune out in recent years. He seemed too convinced we
| were all going to die from COVID.
| prmoustache wrote:
| That is the moment you realize the internet is huge. That
| someone could make a living out of a weblog yelling at clouds
| and you never heard about it despite being online almost every
| day during the same period.
| cauthon wrote:
| Are you under 30?
| IncRnd wrote:
| Funny you say that, because the author of kottke isn't.
| edizms wrote:
| What does that have to do with not knowing about this site?
| IncRnd wrote:
| First, I was pointing out the shortsightedness of the
| comment to which I had replied. However, your question is
| answered in the article.
|
| The author's age is related to how long Kokkte has
| existed as a blog, which is longer than those who are 30
| today have been browsing the web. From the actual
| article, "I've been writing kottke.org for 25 years".
| This means that people who are over 30 today were the
| initial boosters for kottke. Kokkte is a person's
| blogsite, not something targeted to people under 30.
|
| As the article says, kokkte.org is older than google. The
| author didn't start blogging when he was 5.
|
| There is also a pertinent point on wikipedia about Jason
| Kokkte. "In 2005 Kottke was able to quit his day job to
| focus on blogging full-time." [1] He wasn't supported by
| people who were at most 12 years old.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Kottke
| doublepg23 wrote:
| Same although I'm only a few months older than the blog.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Hey, this is so nice. I used to be a regular on your website. I
| fondly remember a time when you included my website in one of
| your article (blog post) and I had that traffic spike. I mean, my
| simple personal website being linked from the likes of Kottke,
| 9rules, Adobe, etc were a big-big thing for me. :-)
|
| Thank you for keeping the site alive.
| cdevroe wrote:
| Nice 9rules shoutout there. :)
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| I remember subscribing to kottke.org with Bloglines :P
| edizms wrote:
| Never heard of it.
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(page generated 2023-03-15 23:02 UTC)