Browsing around for my favorite blog post for Fabruary, I just ran into Lou Plummer’s What Were Your First Seven Jobs? I say “browsing” but I was really just going through only his archive. I knew when I decided to participate in Robert Birming’s Fabruary that the post I would submit as my favorite would be something written by Lou.

The March edition of the IndieWeb Carnival is about accessibility on the small web. The host, orchids, touches on a note-worthy design pattern found in this fine corner of the Internet: that of artsy, personal websites that emulate technology of old, particularly the early days of Internet. The fair question orchids poses is: how does this design pattern affect people with particular accessibility needs? Here I am. I always say that I like returning from church with more questions than I brought in.

The surfer, she tells me she met a woman at a 40s singles mixer. The type of woman who reschedules her flight home to Colorado so that they can have sushi in California. There’s a sweetness to tales of the dating world when I’m in a monogamous relationship. I feel only a little bad about appropriating them to satisfy something which I can’t put into words. Imagine the world in which I hadn’t spotted the surfer in the queer Catholic Slack space of Vine & Fig when I did, that one day she was there.

Replied to Simone Silvestroni

I love this essay, Simone. Fully embracing the very IndieWeb concept of a personal website has helped me shake this feeling of FOMO, I imagine the same way it did for you. Don’t be hard on yourself, though, we all fell for this concept, and many of us still do. If society presents something as a way to solve a problem, most people will eventually try it. And while it does solve some problems, it also creates others. I have a few Gen Z friends who never fail to make me feel old whenever they talk about “their personal brand” in an unironic way. Gives me the shivers.

More than any other time in my online life am I aware of the value of alt text. I make a point to write image descriptions whenever I can. Kind strangers with a variety of accessibility needs have been helping me understand how to best capture my interpretation of an image. I’ve come to regard alt text as the secret side bar I get to have with blind people and others who need it.

I am nostalgic about the way the Web used to be. I miss the handcrafted blogs that I used to visit, and the intimate windows they gave me into the lives of strangers. I miss that I knew all the domain names by heart. It is a phantom pain of sorts; an unrest in the tip of my fingers reminding me I no longer need to make series of key combinations to find those personal public spaces, some more arts-and-craftsy than others, because most of them are gone.

The only journal I’ve ever been able to successfully keep is a photo journal. Not so much the one-book or one-website type, but more so a simply collection of visual anecdotes, encounters and experiences. My first website was called www.doyoulikemytightsweater.com. It was a HTML-based one-photo-per-page website that I updated very frequently. Ever since the domain expired and I got a little sick of getting pervy emails (I should have known), I had never owned a photo website that I loved so much.