I have no doubt I’ll upgrade to Photo Mechanic v6 on March 25th.
Dynamic and Startling Interactive Media (circa 1996)
I finally found a copy of our first fusionary.com website from 1996. It looked like this:
Fusionary.com v1, 1996
I love that we called it “The Atomic Age Page: Dynamic and Startling Interactive Media”. And I really love the original artwork (by Brad Yarhouse).
I’d been unable to track down the site on archive.org. Turns out it was archived under a different hostname. I learned this yesterday when, moving some boxes, I found this…
Server label, 1996
That was the label affixed to our web server, a Power Mac 8150.
We built the site using the latest in web technology!
Seriously though, the site had some fun and not yet common features. For example, you could click a button and a loud alert would play in the office a few seconds before a photo was taken and shown to the visitor.
Or you could “talk” to us by filling in a form, which ran an AppleScript and made the Mac “speak” the words. This was of course before the internet filled up with assholes. Here are the highlights
I’m so happy to have found all of this. I wanted my own copy, so I downloaded what I could from Archive.org’s archive, cleaned it up and put it out on a server.
So here it is, complete in its Dynamic and Startling wonder…
I’m running a Pleroma.social instance
Just for fun, I installed Pleroma on a little GCP Debian instance. It was easy. Nothing like the mess that is Mastodon. Very few dependencies and low server requirements.
Following Mastodon users works like a charm. It’s so compatible with Mastodon that it ships with an optional Mastodon front end.
It’s running at mb.baty.net but I don’t know what I’ll do with it. Gotta find a better domain name, that’s for sure.
Neat, my Delicious Library was just sitting in a GCP bucket. I’d forgotten about it. That was (is?) a great tool for tracking physical media.
I now have Isso comments running on my server and have (I think) successfully integrated it on baty.blog. This means one less subscription and no 3rd-party dependency. There’s some CSS work yet to do.
I’m happy with my online stuff right now
For the first time in forever, I’m content with the online versions of “my stuff”.
My blog (you’re soaking in it) looks weird and is kind of hard to read but I intend to keep it mostly the same for a while. For some reason, the funky layout suits a messy combination of photos, “micro” posts, and normal posts. One day it’ll annoy me and I’ll change it all again, but for now it’s good. And Blot.im remains the best combination of easy, fast, and flexible tool for blogging that I’ve found. It’s so good.
Micro.blog is still a friendly, open, and interesting community and my favorite place to hang out.
Flickr is fun again. Nothing much has changed since SmugMug bought it, but just knowing about the new ownership has renewed my interest in posting there. I’m so bullish about Flickr that I’ve started embedding photos on my blog rather than posting copies. I may regret this one day but ¯_(ツ)_/¯. My thinking is that photos having some sort of editorial content will be copied here, but for simple sharing, embedding is fine.
And finally, my wiki, Rudimentary Lathe. I can’t believe how quickly and completely I’ve fallen in love with using TiddlyWiki to post anything and everything I’m thinking about. I’ve started many wikis over the years, but they have never stuck. It turns out that even though I love the wiki concept, it’s the specific implementation by TiddlyWiki that makes it fun and therefore something I continue to enjoy doing. I also love that there’s no RSS feed, so putting stuff at RL (I guess I call it “RL”, now) doesn’t feel like “publishing”. It makes a difference.
This post is me bookmarking a moment of calm in the usual chaotic mess of my online presence. For now, at least for now, I’m just writing things down without worrying much about how or where I do it. I hope it lasts.