While I am wondering what to do about the nocategories ghost town, I am recalling what it was that brought me to have anything to do with owning a website in the first place.
Well, of course it all has its roots in earlier things, when I was quite a bit younger and the Internet was as yet unborn in my little West Virginia mountain-town. Punk rock was alive and well, though, and so I learned all about zines. That was my lowbrow introduction to the idea of publishing, something that appealed to me, even as an adolescent, as part of a dream for my future.
I wasn’t as excited about music or politics as those punks with zines, but luckily, that meant that I was able to get an audience! Apocalypse Playground was surprisingly popular.
My highbrow introduction came to me from William Blake, who simply made his own books and distributed them. Every one of them was different, too. And so, with William Blake and the punks in mind, I took to the internet.
By the time I became very interested in writing for the internet, the weblog phenomena has already gone into full swing. I hopped on the bandwagon, or else you wouldn’t be reading it, but initially I had something else in mind.
What I like about the weblog way of doing things is that it’s easy to put things online that way. What I don’t like about it is the way the material gets presented. The material is not presented, its just there, in a big blog. Even the word blog suggests to me a big pile, an unmanageable pile, and a pile of… whatever, with the newest stuff thrown on top.
What I like about a zine is that it is printed, tangible, portable, etc. What I don’t like about a zine is that I had to shell out all the costs for printing, postage, and so on. Come to think of it though, the zine cost about the same amount of money, every year, as a web server costs now, but the zine made a profit, the website does not, probably will not.
It occurs to me that there is a good way to compromise. Instead of using the weblog model for writing online, there are other ways… Perhaps I could go back to making a zine, print as many as I like for my friends, and publish the thing as a PDF file online, so that anyone else can print and redistribute at will. I would rather do something a little bit more grown-up than a zine, call it a chapbook, an “artist’s book” in fact I could care less what you call it.
Another idea would be to fashion the website after a magazine. Online magazines do enjoy a limited popularity, but the ones I like most are the ones that don’t really call themselves magazines. Some examples, notable for their design are Apple Pro and Coudal Partners. Others, notable (only) for their content, include Jacket Magazine and Arts and Letters Daily. (the first of those was mentioned in a recent post on the changing status of literary magazines in the age of post-mechanical reproduction on silliman’s Blog For something more like a cross between a magazine and a weblog, something that falls a bit more on the side of a weblog than I would like to see, take a look at the very useful A List Apart.
I think that making the shift from a weblog to something more like a magazine will prove to be a good practice for making a hypertext that works like a book.
