lab.artlung.com and a return to a World Wide Web

I have made every kind of web page. I’ve worked on every sort of web application. I learned ColdFusion. I learned Perl. I learned PHP. CSS came out at the start of my career.

Active Server Pages (“ASP”) is now referred to as “Classic ASP” which makes it sound related to some middle-aged-man’s drop-top Corvette Stingray. I learned ASP too.

When I was learning, I used my website to play with the web. I called it THE LAB. I want to talk about how it came to be and how it changed with time today.

In part I created the site to help me remember little bits of arcana that kept coming up for me as a web developer. I remember looking up my page Preventing Browser Cache several times to see the various different ways the different application platforms represented the HTTP headers. Originally pages like this were here on artlung.com. I put them on my website as part of giving back to the web. It felt good. I had learned so much from mailing lists–sometimes called listservs: Webmonster, Web405, evolt.org, webdesign-L, WWWAC, WebSanDiego, GOODTIMES and others taught me so much. Mailing lists are gone, as are most of their archives.

I also learned on usenet. The comp.* groups had some great stuff. And for a time Macromedia offered their own newsgroup hierarchy. It used to be you could click on news://forums.macromedia.com/macromedia.dreamweaver and fire up your newsreader and get help about Dreamweaver. All of that is now history. Some of that is archived to the web.

Here in 2024 one can use StackOverflow to ask questions and discuss programming.

We can also type a question into Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo. Often what comes up are ads and summations “written”–which is to say–laundered through an AI tool. But those written words couldn’t exist without human effort. Human beings are part of the system. We forget those humans in the loop at our peril. It’s why I try to add webmention support to anything new I build for the web. Aaron Parecki’s excellent webmention.io service is one of the best parts of the independent web: the indieweb.

I’m writing this at a coffee shop a stone’s throw from what was the site of San Diego Technical Books. I would go there just to browse and to learn. And yes, buy a book now and again. But technical bookstores are also mostly gone. Things went online.

And for a while, the web was pretty good at replacing mailing lists, newsgroups, and even paper books.

But gradually, the web has gotten worse. Things seemed to have gotten so spammy and troll-filled and the good parts of the web have gone underground to places like Discord and Patreon and Substack and Facebook. Gated by rules or fees or sign-up required.

But that means I can’t find a lot of those things on the web. If I can’t search for it, I can’t find it. It’s invisible. And a private site is fine, of course. We all ought to have the right to create private enclaves for us and a few friends. But if my intent is for a site to be useful to the world, I am often thwarted by the search engine gatekeepers. They don’t want you to visit my site as much as they want you to stay on their site as long as possible.

I made an effort to make my own site better and more of a “place” when I added comments in 2010. I used Disqus. It worked, and still works, great. People can make suggestions as to what specific thing they would encounter when, say, creating a menu, or trying to get SQL to behave. People would leave a “thank you” comment occasionally. Some folks emailed me to comment or thank. Disqus includes moderation tools to allow me to make choices about what can and can’t go into the site, which kept spam out.

But I also made the site worse in the 2010s. I added Google Ads. They were not intrusive, just a banner on the side. But they got worse, spawning big takeovers and keeping the reader from seeing the page they came for.

And so, I remade The Lab

lab.artlung.com has been fully refitted and I’m rather proud of it all. It’s all hand-rolled PHP code underpinning it. I’m using composer to allow me to pull in useful libraries to read and write YAML consistently, to compress JavaScript (I did that to make it easy to create bookmarklets) and something to streamline creating an Atom feed. The site has webmentions and unit tests and I use PHP_CodeSniffer to keep the code from being a tangled mess. I have fun features like a random page load when you do (alt-r or option-r). It includes og:image capture using the excellent shot-scraper. I also created a command line tool to force myself to do some sort of organization on the many pages. And it’s gotten me to create some new pages too. I don’t have anything about React on the site but that may change!

I’m glad for this change. It’s a return to practices that are good parts of the web: Sharing source code (all the code is up on GitHub). Sharing with each other. No ads, or at least I promise non-intrusive ads.

We have let the badness of computers and technology force us to forget why the web became the largest publishing and communications platform humanity ever made. We spend times in apps where algorithms seem to prevent us from doing what we want to do. Sharing what I want to share is complicated and tricky and often forces me to download an app I don’t want. And so we’re frustrated and isolated from things that might be useful or fun or interesting or elucidating.

But you and me, we own the web. It’s ours.

We talked the other day in an IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club meeting about “WWW” and why sites seldom have that at the beginnings of their web urls. For a time, every site had that "www" at the beginning when publicizing their websites. But then it seemed kind of antiquated to use that. We have domains that scarcely look like domains. I have a page on tilde.club and it still surprises me that’s a legitimate domain name. But it is.

I want to bring back a recognition that the web is useful and good. “World Wide Web” is not quaint. I think of it as a statement of intent. It’s a three-word manifesto. World. Wide. Web: Information for the whole world, no matter who you are, or where you are, interlinked. No registration required. No cookies required. No newsletter to subscribe to. No Discord to join. No monthly fee.

And so I offer up the lab.

It’s so fun to make web pages and share them.

Go make a web page and share it.