Blog Not Needed

I’ve been submitting this blog to a few of the blog search engines. Why? oh I don’t know, but what’s funny is I submitted it to this directory called MyBlog2U.

Well, I got an email from the Webmaster (an automated email response to be sure) informing me that they declined to include my listing. That’s all fine and dandy, but what really got me was the ridiculous email they sent. Here’s one of the more stupid lines:

“Violated of our Submission Guidelines.”

Wow! Its English people! Learn to use it!

I also liked this classically stupid misspelling:

“reveiwed”

Gah! “i” before “e” knuckleheads! Holy shit… time to hit 5th grade English again.

Oh well, I’m done making fun of stupidity now (you’ll notice that if you read this blog, I do this because I can. Its how I show I care, at the same time how I simply do not suffer idiots lightly)

I’ve given up on the old “store” provider. They sucked, their interface was next to impossible to use, and I never could easily update things so the darn thing just went stale. Well, I found a new provider, one that seems, so far, not to suck too terribly bad, and one that has a rather enlightened perspective as far as licensing and copyright, so I’m going to give them a shot.

I’m going to be working on a few designs, but not just for the site, I’d like to produce other designs for our larger constituents, like zines, indie music, publishing etc.

Here’s where you come in. I’d love to see designs submitted by volunteers! The best part is, I can’t possibly pay you! Such a deal, eh? Well, you will, of course, get a free copy of the shirt, and my undying respect and admiration. So, if you got some chops in the the design racket, you let me know and send along your designs to:

dpalmer ((at)) diysearch ((dot)) com

and lets do some bidness!

Just wanted to take a minute and wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving… even if you don’t live in the US.

Yep, me and the significantly better half are all set, got the Tofurkey roast in the freezer (we prefer not to eat dead birds, or other animals for that matter) and I’m going to make some stuffing from scratch (I’m famous for it, well, no, but I do get compliments).

So, have a nice couple of days, I’m going to be working on the site here and there, but mostly chilling. Yay! Vacation!

Lately I’ve been doing a little PR work for old DIYSearch, mostly because of a trend I’ve noticed, something that has really shaken something loose in me, regarding this project.

Back in the good old days, in the late 90’s when I started this site, it had a rather nice surge of visitors and links, so much so that it caught the eye of Wired News, with said publication saying that perhaps it might be too successful and collapse under its own, well, yeah, I suppose that actually did happen. It all started going south a few years ago with lots of script kiddie hacks, site instability and lest I forget about the huge life events that happened to me personally that made updating and maintaining the site almost non-existent.

Well, this caused a huge slide in new users and visitors to the site. Its sad really, but its also the way of things, no one to blame but myself.

What really shook me was the fact that DIYSearch has now slid to the 11th page of results in Google for the “DIY” keyword (we used to be on the first page, within the first 3 or 4 results).

So, why am I sharing all of this. Well first, I am big on transparency. You’ll never find me NOT reporting the bad stuff along with the good stuff. I’m not here to make this site or myself look better than I or it is. Quite frankly I consider this to be a failure on my part.

But, I’m not here to wallow in my stupidity or personal failures, I’m here to say that I am working on fixing these things. One thing is that I’m actually starting to promote the site. It’ll be slow because now, DIYSearch is a nothing site, not even visible on anyone’s radar screen, so it will most certainly be an uphill battle. I think I can do this though, its another project, another thing to figure out.

Why is this so important to me? Why bother? I suppose mostly because I have been doing this for as long as I have (11 years now) but also because, well, I’m a geek. Its a problem. I love solving problems. I love making things (which is what brought me to the DIY world in the first place!) I bother because without this, I would just go and do something else, and this is still interesting for me.

I was recently going through the almost ghost town of alt.zines and there was an interesting post, “is zinning dead?”

I’ve been into the whole zine publishing thing since 1998, when I helped some friends with a zine called Empty Words in Erie, PA. I kept with the zine thing and got pretty successful with it (publishing UPState zine, a Syracuse, NY hardcore/straight edge zine) and contributing to numerous other zines as well as starting other small run zines since then.

But I can’t help notice that zine publishing has been shrinking or at least and perhaps this is what I secretly hope for, that zine publishing is crawling back to the real underground. For many years zines have enjoyed a rather interesting flirtation with the mainstream media (usually via the predominance of ezines turned blogs) and the realization of real free DIY publishing (whether through low to no-cost web hosting or via Cafe Press etc.)

There was always a craft involved with zine publishing, and the online world, while not completely eliminating the craft (more like changed the craft) the act of publishing zine requires a certain art that often, in our modern go go buzzword world, goes AWOL. I mean, there are just so many kids out there who would rather toss up a myspace page or a free blog and rant and rave about high school than interviewing a band or reviewing a pile or records, sneaking off to the kinkos to get 50 copies made, or even better sneaking into work after hours and comendering the copy machine. That element is really missing and because of that, perhaps zine publishing is dead.

In as much as anything that stirs up and requires passion can ever die, I firmly believe zine publishing is and never will die, so long as there are folks out there who want not just alternative non-mainstream news/information, but more importantly like to experience publications that express the author’s/publisher’s self and perspectives in truly unique forms without any constraints. So, zines? dead? No, not hardly. Its just like the “good old days” where you just have to look a little harder to find them. alt.zines has run its course I believe and probably isn’t the best source of zine publishing community activity. I could be wrong there, but since the question was asked there, my answer ends there.