!Web services I used and liked --- agk's diary 7 May 2024 @ 20:01 UTC --- written on GPD Win 1 while first daughter naps --- I got an email from the 25-year-old tech collective Riseup today about their history. Out of fondness inspired by the email, here are web services I've liked: 1998 I think was when I made an Angelfire website, an online presence for my teenaged goth 'zine publishing concern. When I got in trouble for one of my 'zines, had to shred all the copies left in my inventory and replace my website with an apology page, I made a minimalist- styled website on nettrash. Both are cool to look back on, fragments that survived, anyway. I had fun making gifs pixel by pixel for my Angelfire site, and hosted a cool original story I have to put in print, brutal true memoir of '90s girlhood by one of my friends, emailed chapter by chapter. The nettrash website was mirrored on another free webhost. It had an active message board, creative writing, and ICQ conversation logs. It was a web community for my friends. 2001 til 2020 I subscribed to a FindMail/eGroups/ Yahoo! Groups email group. In the early 2000s, it was the reason I used computers. I had a @disinfo.net email account, then FastMail. A group of protest medics announced upcoming actions, planned support, debriefed after, and developed protocols and health education on the list. I looked at it from library computers as I rode buses, hitchiked, and later trainhopped around the country. It gave me where to go to and kept me connected to a community memory. 2006 Wikia was a MediaWiki wikifarm for fandoms. I started a wiki for protest medics when the old action-medical.net domain name lapsed. It was adjunct to the email list, and used for archiving protocols and history, and writing new protocols. It lasted til 2018, I think. I love wikis, and have also hosted them on farms I liked better than wikia: wikidot and branchable. But the medic wiki drew the best community and had the highest profile. People don't look at websites anymore. 2009 I worked some dispatch shifts, dispatching medics at a large convergence via twitter. It was a refinement of txtmob, a service developed for protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention. It let you run something like an email list over sms text messages, and saved from renting radios and a repeater, because most people had cellphones (not smartphones). The dispatcher added participants to a list or they sent a request text message to shortcode 40404. Inbound messages went to dispatch, who read them for situational awareness and only released messages for mass rebroadcast or passed messages to specific teams as approp- riate. Dispatch shared a blackberry I think, field medics had flip or candybar phones. Everyone had radio discipline. 2010 I used Google Wave as a communications suite for an organization operating in the aftermath of the Macondo blowout/Gulf of Mexico oil spill. My friend sent me an invite. I liked the etherpad-like ability to simult- aneously collaboratively edit, or thread like email exchanges. Our photographer liked being able to send her pictures. I remember doing collaborative mapping too, of oil slick dispersion, wildlife/marsh grass oiling, etc. 2011 Riseup, the friends who sent the email which sent me on this trip down memory lane, wrote web 2.0 software called crabgrass. They hosted an instance at we.riseup.net. It worked well enough when we used it for the business of Occupy Wall Street's medics. Budgets, meeting minutes, inventory, graphics (like templates for insignia), and even some online decision-making were done on it. There was a learning curve, but it served us during the occupation of Zucotti Park in New York City and for the following year of marches, dispersed occupations, squats, mass housing. 2018 I used a platform called sandstorm for field- work in central Appalachia to develop a new federally-supported long-distance bike route. Sandstorm hosts independent web applications, but handles security policies and a cool approach to authorization. We developed documents in etherpads, kept spreadsheets, a rocket chat, uploaded photos, etc into a shared workspace that had enough in common with the Google Suite which was becoming widely used that my teammates didn't mind it much. I found it really easy to admin- istrate, and our data was ours. Some friends who ran a big bail fund for arrested activists hosted a spreadsheet on a sandstorm instance and suffered one catast- rophic data loss. Making backups is easy on sandstorm, but they didn't have a recent one, so abandoned the platform. 2020 I made an sdf account. I've used webpages here for a million things: public "calling card", resume host, event planning, "handouts" or slideshows for when I teach, budgeting, to-do lists and calendering. I love my gopher hole. I like the email and bboard, and periodically dip into radio, voip, and com. I did a lot offline. Typewriters in the '90s, mail, scissors, scotch tape, and photocopies at least once a week even now, whiteboards and sticky notes to teach, manage research, or disaster management dispatch or incident command, clipboards hung on nails, pen and paper drafts, singing while I cook, listening to the radio, reading books. But thank you, today, to the developers.