Web Spinners

Homo sum: I am a humanist. Nihil humanem a mihi alienam puto: Want fries with that? Not me, thank you very much. I remember when Macdonald's fries really were as good as they looked. Better. Because they were fried in real fat. Before George McGovern and policical correctness destroyed our world. (Yeah, I voted for George. Would again. Because Nixon was worse. Much worse.)

I was part of the WorldWide Web before it got ported to the Internet. Back when Robert Maynard Hutchins was calling it The Great Conversation. When hypertext was all footnotes and bibliography, and when markup was what the copy editor did to hard copy before somebody took it (yes, took it) to the printer -- the guy who ran the print shop. (Printer used to be a job people did. So was computer.)

I will not linger to describe the GENIAC (Genius Almost-automatic Computer) I bolted together for a science fair in the Sputnik era, or being driven from Columbia to Hofstra with boxes of survey forms to be scanned onto magnetic tape. Or trying to figure why an ADMINS/11 routine wasn't working on a monitor that displayed upper case only. Or connecting to Compuserve for the first time, on the Atari 400 the bank sold me for fifty bucks to keep me out of the branch office, with wires running to the phone jack and to the antenna connection of the black and white TV. (Yes, color had been invented already.) Or connecting a cassette player to the little black Timex Sinclair ZX81 with the 16K memory upgrade so I could load the Forth interpreter for programs I had written out longhand on yellow legal pads. (Forth because I was in love with the idea of APL, which you couldn't do at home.)

I had a home page on Tripod before Lycos bought it, HoTMaiL (please note the caps) and ListBot before they went over to the Dark Side, Rocketmail and EGroups before the Yahoos swallowed them up. (YAHOO was an acronym, by the way, I don't remember for what. Google was only a number.) I had advanced windows features at home before Windows users did, because I was running DR (not MS) DOS from Digital Research.

To get on line, as often as not I would take the IRT Seventh Avenue express to 14th Street and the M14A bus to opposite Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, where alt.coffee, the first if the Internet cafes occupied a basement. The bathroom in the back was still a bathroom in that it still had an old enameled iron bathtub, filled almost to the ceiling with dead computers, not just Trash Eighties from Radio Shack, but Kaypros, maybe even an Osborne One, the granddaddy of them all. (As for Radio Shack, the one around the corner from me used to be a Sufi bookshop, which didn't survive the Iranian Revolution. I saw John and Yoko there, didn't recognize either. The Radio Shack in the Empire State Building was a small part of the Tandy Leather craft store. Never mind.) Later I would use the new Business and Science Library in the old Orbach's department store building. It was free, and it did my heart good to see the homeless lined up to check their email as for a soup kitchen. They weren't all outsourced programmers either.

So I've been around the block -- more than once. How would I do things now, in this Twentyfirst Century world of Web 2.0, 3.0, whatever?

I assume you can get on line. You probably have email from school or work, or your ISP, either the phone company or the cable company. You many be on Facebook or MySpace, or bare it all on LiveJournal. You may want to sell stuff, or recruit other people to sell stuff. What next? Here's what. And here's how.

First of all, get on Gmail. You don't want to depend on your school, your employer, or your ISP. Use any name you like that isn't taken, even your own. It doesn't matter a great deal, as nobody need ever see it.

Now buy your domain. Godaddy is popular; I like NameCheap. When you pick a domain name, keep in mind that you will eventually be using subdomains. When you buy "abuse.me" (".me" is now available along with ".com," ".org," and so on) you will be able to have different sites at "dont.abuse.me" and "please.abuse.me. " Let's say you are the proud owner of "gargamel.org" -- though I'm quite sure the name is taken, let's use it as an example.

Go back to Gmail and open a new account for "gargamel.org@gmail.com." Set it up so that all incoming mail is forwarded to the first Gmail account you created. Go back to the people who sold you the domain, and have them forward all email sent to any name at gargamel.org ("*@gargamel.org" in geekspeak) to "gargamel.org@gmail.com." Later you might want someone else to have an email address at your domain. You can do this for free from the domain's Gmail account; the domain people might charge you extra for the service.

Now pick a name for yourself at your domain, say, "wizard@gargamel.org." Go to the first account you created, and set it up to send mail as "wizard@gargamel.org." Before it will do that it must ask permission from the real "wizard," who is of course you. Gmail will send an email to "wizard," which will be forwarded to you immediately, and you will click on a link to give yourself permission to send email from Gmail with your own domain as a return address.

You may already have a web page somewhere or other. But you should have one for each domain you own. Now the fellow who invented the browser as we know it had created something called Ning, which allows you to have not only a personal web page, but a whole social network for your friends, customers, neighbors, and so on. And on that network you can have a personal home page, and so can the other members of your domain's network. You just can't host adult content as defined by Google, on whom Ning depends for advertising revenue. This will probably not concern most folks here; only one percent of the Ning networks were targeted for deletion early in 2009, and Ning was helping them export their content. If they could find anywhere to move it to -- perhaps one of the networks created by refugees from tribe.net after their last change in management.

Chances are you can get "gargamel.ning.com" for your address there, unless the guy who owns "gargamel.com" -- or some other fan of the Smnurfs -- beat you to it, in which case you might have to settle for "gargemelorg" or "gargemorg" or something. That doesn't matter much because you can instruct the guys who sold you the domain to send all requests for "http://www.gargamel.org" or "http://gargamel.org" to the Ning address -- if you have the premium service from Ning, which costs five dollars a month, not bad at all. And when you set up your personal home page on your network you might even be able to have "http://wizard.gargamel.org" forwarded to that page. I'm not really sure.

If you are into affiliate or network marketing you have already realized that you can use a subdomain to cloak an affiliate or recruiting link. This prevents anyone who finds a product or opportunity through your efforts from getting it while giving your commission to somebody else. Besides which, "http://birdseed.gargamel.org" is a lot simpler than "http://gargamel.birdseed.hop.clickbank.net/" -- and some affiliate links look much worse than that.

There is of course a great deal more to be said, but this is enough for now.