Support

In the entire twenty years of this website’s existence, I have never monetized it. No ads, no gimmicks, nada. It has been self-sufficient this whole time. But, all of a sudden I find myself in a situation where rising costs of server hosts and email hosts may be too much at the moment.

The domain for this website (chrisdenbow.com) expires next month.

The email address services (hello@chrisdenbow.com) also expires next month.

For the couple of hundred interested followers of this site, thank you for your interest through the years. If you have the kindness and appreciation for me and or this site, please consider sending a donation to help keep this site going for another year.

Apologies in advance. I am not use to this situation and I find it difficult to type these words. If interested, please send me a message to the above email address before October 24, 2022.

Thank you.

On Contentment

Lately I’ve been playing ping-pong in my brain about changing platforms. I set myself up on a 14-day trial to host this site on another server and within 14 minutes decided it was too much of a struggle.

I’ve spent hours, months and years to get this site where I want it.

As a geek, however, I have the prerogative to change my mind at any time and without notice!

Photo Workflow

My current creative workflow is simple, on purpose. I’d rather be out there shooting than processing or organizing.

I don’t have the time or desire to go out for that one shot that will make me famous. I want to create a body of work. I’m not interested in social media “likes” or new followers scrolling through their feeds quickly and not caring.

Innovate your new workflow by keeping it simple, self-host your own website, create digital, or e-zines in .pdf. Offer prints and downloads of your work instead. This will generate a more positive, direct response from potential followers. 

Anti-Censorship

Four years ago today I decided that I wasn’t having fun using Google anything, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram anymore, so I downloaded all my content from those platforms and promptly deleted those accounts. No Google products and no social media. If you’ve DM’d me, then apologies. It was unseen. Send me an email or text instead.

It just so happens that I have a lot to say so I’ve posted here and my micro site instead. My thoughts, my images, my words, no censorship.

These are the benefits of posting to a site I own for over twenty years..

I believe the more people that talk to each other is good and that the 280 character limit on those platforms rewards creativity. Buying and hosting your own website and email address should enable you to have your voice heard- just like it used to be on Web 1.0.

The Internet Is Broken

Anyone else noticed that today’s WWW is insufferable? I don’t specifically know when it turned, or why most users became jerks, but I’ll go ahead and guess about 2010. Making money off of content became more important than the content itself. This is a long post, but in short, the best way to fix it is to write good stuff and to be nice to other people. As the WWW was intended.

In the past, we got to enjoy content-rich websites created by people from all walks of life. They built and hosted their websites and networked with others to share their stuff, and it worked. Internet = interconnected. We learned from others, and we benefitted from other’s unique knowledge. Nowadays, there are advertisements everywhere, clickbait headlines as well as the tracking and selling of your private data and browsing habits. Where did all that good stuff go? To Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. etc.

Content creators, webmasters, and anyone with a hobby blog generally gave up and went the easy route of 180 character tweets and generic posts about what they ate and where on Facebook. Boring. People used to write, or photograph, or paint stuff that others would want to read. People used to write blogs, whether they were read or not, no one knew. Aficionados of every imaginable topic would research and post their findings for all to see.

When the tech conglomerates started to gather and consolidate web properties, the content was squeezed out. These platforms were nicknamed Web 2.0 as if version 1 needed upgrading. Version 2 was not an upgrade in my mind, in fact, it made the internet worse.

Ad-driven content became a thing. You had to pay to play. The more eyeballs and attention on your stuff can be monetized to the widest possible audience. The internet became deceptive and, oddly, less social. Users became mean and divisive because now there was perceived competition.

It is almost impossible to find good content on the WWW now. Type a topic of interest on a conglomerate-ran browser, and you’ll have to sort through at least two pages of the search to get to anything that isn’t ad-driven and would be relevant to your search.

When you do come across an interesting link, you are bombarded with sneaky and not so sneaky tactics to get your attention and your data. Web windows will pop up blocking the content, asking you to submit your personal info and subscribe. Pleas to purchase something that is offered. Advertisements litter the site with most, overwhelming the content you want to see. “Like me on Facebook”, Comment! Subscribe! Retweet! That is just what we see, but goes unseen is the amount of personal data that is collected and distributed to the tech conglomerates. Did you do a search on a medical symptom? Well now, the next website you visit will have a pop-up advertisement on a specific cream to help remedy that. It’s disgusting, invasive, and intolerable.

Where are people writing now instead of their own homegrown webpage? Social media. If you write on Facebook or post images to Instagram, the only people who can see it our the users on the platform. Have a business and your “website” is only a Facebook business page? Half of your potential customers cannot see it unless they are a Facebook user. No, thanks. Instead, people are writing out their limited thoughts on a limited platform that does nothing to further a conversation. That is, if you can actually see it on the FB platform. Facebook’s algorithm guarantees your content will be buried in favor of something they claim is more interesting (read that as attention-getting and therefore more potential ad revenue for them.)

I won’t continue on about how the political and social media outlets combined are divisive and spiteful. I stopped both after the 2016 election, and I am blissfully ignorant.

All this wasted time, effort, content, and energy spent on these proprietary platforms do nothing for the individual except to make themselves money.

What’s the fix?

Create your own website. WordPress has free (with ads) hosting options as a start. Or you can use WordPress on your own hosted site. Web hosts and your domain name makes it yours and on the cheap.

Write or post anything you’d like. It’s yours to do with as you please.

Network. Reach out to other like-minded people and build each other up.

If you must use social media, put your content on your site first, then distribute to those outlets. Add a link back to your website and point potential followers there instead. POSSE: “Post On Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.”

Send the website owner an encouraging email.

Comment on a post of theirs.

Subscribe to their RSS feed and don’t miss a thing.

Use ad-blockers, browsers that promote privacy and mean it, and a VPN.

And finally, make good content to share for anyone who may take an interest and be nice to others.

Server Issues

After an hour and a half with my server host, the connection issue to my Micro posts page was unresolved. I am trying to secure the web certificate so it reads as:

https://www.micro.chrisdenbow.com

The “S” in the domain name denotes a secure website. But the server hosts were useless and it took the site down completely. I finally restored it myself in the cPanel but not without frustration. Now I’ll just leave it alone.

I Want This

There are many things in my life that I don’t need. I don’t need half the technology I have, nor most of online services that I pay for. This includes the hosting for my website. I don’t need it, but it does serve a purpose deeper than the amount it costs me each year and gives me value.

My website(s) have been up for more than two decades (learning from a file error mistake, the earliest post I still have is from 2013) and it has been through various iterations. The most recent of which was going back to a personal web server host. The benefits and hours devoted to the setup and install outweigh the costs.

This website has been many things over the years such as, attempted portfolios, business ventures (photography) and a lot of design coding, but still provides an outlet for me. In reality, this website provides very little to me, it doesn’t receive accolades or followers as much as it used to, my life would remain unchanged if I didn’t have this outlet, but I still want one.

This is a journal, a hobby for sure, but writing gives me something that nothing else provides. I love networking with people and I enjoy journaling. Long form and short form both help me document my life as it is currently. Sometimes other people join me here and that is fantastic. Just because I receive nothing in return (on the surface), it doesn’t mean that this doesn’t have value. I believe everyone needs to have their own space on the world wide web.

No one or their website, should focus on follower count, advertising, tracking or page views. You won’t recoup your costs, let’s be honest. This is a personal website and are beholden to no one. You publish what you want, when you want and how you need to.

I don’t need this but I want this.

Writing on the WWW

Own your website. It’s important because you control the format now and forever if you want to. No social media because that isn’t yours. Your social media account is just renting space until you are evicted.

Buy a domain name, choose a blog host, install WordPress blogging software on it. Once you are about 50% content with the way your own site looks, move on to long form and short form writing, photos, drawings, whatever you fancy… because it is yours. Leave the final 50% for slow, and incremental enhancements along the way. If you’re wondering what style or format you should write, write as though if you were writing a friend in an email.

Categorize and tag your posts for future reference and easy search on a topic you wrote 5 years ago. You’ll thank yourself later.

While going through the downloaded archives of my old Twitter account, I realized several things which are going to shape the way I write on the web in the future.

The mundane rituals of the past will now seem fascinating in 10 years time, because you see that things have changed and have also stayed the same. Such as living in a different state(s), or you’re now with someone else. Taking a moment to capture your life as it is now helps nostalgia down the road.

2006–10–25 19:37:06 +0000 My obligatory first tweet here on TWTTR.

2007–12–07 03:42:50 +0000 still can’t get Photoshop working and now I can’t open the RAW images I took from my new Nikon D200 camera. @#$%@*&

2012–01–17 21:30:40 +0000 Relocating to Tulsa in T-minus 12 hours.

2012–12–07 13:50:58 +0000 Holy shit I turned 40 today.

Twitter: @mojodenbow


Those tweets are well and good for documenting the times but how much more valuable are they on your own website? Social media isn’t forever, they come, go and most will take all the effort you put into it with them. I can look back fondly on my brief flirtation with both Linux and Windows operating systems, or a photo of my daughter from 2009 easily.


JANUARY 1, 2013 / CHRIS / INFODENBOW

HAPPY GNU YEAR

I’ve taken on another project that involves diving deep inside the Linux operating itself. For a few years I’ve been using a dual boot hybrid desktop using Ubuntu and Windows 7. I’ve added the Fedora distribution inside a virtual machine inside Ubuntu and deleted the Windows partition. Oh, and GNU = “Gnu’s Not Unix”

HAPPY GNU YEAR post from 01.01.2013, ChrisDenbow.com


So I continue generating text, photos, doodles and anything else I want. For me. This website is a kinetic journal and I plan to continue doing this right to the end. I suggest everyone create their own website here on the WWW.

Consolidation

I am working toward keeping all of my web properties here under a single domain.

New long-form posts will be here. Previous posts (2022-2002) are now in the Archive. I don’t do social media anymore but I do like to fire off some quick posts, mostly to myself and they are now in the Micro page of this website.

The only web property not hosted on my web server is the photography website. I’m okay with that because I prefer the free hosting there and the way it displays images better.

Is this the perfect solution? I don’t know yet but the tinkering has been fun.

As of now, not everyone can see this website due to my domain name chrisdenbow.website being transferred from one domain registrar to another. 5-7 days they say, which is an eternity in tech time.