Blog Not Needed

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.

As I’ve been hinting around for a while now (better part of this year) there is a new site in the works, and its finally starting to come together. The site called, The Autonomic Us, will be the first DIY-centric social networking/bookmarking site specifically designed for those of us into DIY projects (zines, music, crafts, what-have-you.)

This has been a long time in coming and after spending a lot of time, and I do mean A LOT of time looking at the mainstream options (Facebook, Digg, Mulitply, MySpace, Orkut, Friendster…) the realization came to me, as did the original realization to build DIYSearch. There is just too damn much noise out there.

No, Autonomic is NOT out to replace the use of these sites, that would be ridiculous, but the goal behind it is to lower the signal to noise ratio out there for the news/events/announcements folks like you and me, care about.

One thing I am going to be rolling out with this site is the inclusion of Google’s OpenSocial API. It is not my intention to create yet another bloody website you have to create an account on, so the idea is to have Autonomic act as  a host for these other sites and utilize Autonomic’s functionality (posting content, friending, chatting) without worrying about whether or not you have an account. There will also be a Facebook widget as well. I should also say that if you have an existing account on DIYSearch (if you added links) that that will obviously work with Autonomic.

So, when will Autonomic be launching? First of the year is the target. I don’t have a specific date, but it will be in January of 2008, which will mark its “public beta” period.

I’m going to keep posting developments as they are needed.

Stay tuned.

So, while I actually started DIYSearch in May of 1996, the actual thing didn’t get going until November 1996. Two years later I bought the DIYSEARCH.COM domain.

Here we are, 11 years. Over a decade. Its funny to think that we’ve been doing this Web Two-Oh thing (you know, user-generated content/submissions) for that long, way before it had some ridiculous pointless tag attached to it.

To mark our 11th birthday, we have decided to beg and plead with anyone who will listen to help sponsor this project. Its starting to hurt a little (paying all of the bandwidth and server costs) and… well I’m not here to bitch and complain, just to drop a little hint. Wink wink, nudge nudge.

Anyway, 11 years. That’s a long time. Yeah sure there are a few gaps in the history, like where the site went down for almost 3 weeks because I lost my job and had to move and find a new job, yeah things break and I try to get to them as fast as possible. Its the way of such things. The site and the project has been rock stable for a year, without any major mishaps or blunders (on my part) so I’m going to take that as a positive.

I’ve been really enjoying the survey responses, and have found them immensely helpful and useful. Such as over 90 percent of you who took the survey think DIYSearch is still relevant, even after all these years. You also have been providing some excellent ideas for future enhancements, real enhancements, stuff that I am going to work on, as soon as Autonomic is launched.

Oh yeah, and lastly, I believe we have a winner for the name change. Oh don’t worry, DIYSearch isn’t going away, but I feel very strongly over re-naming it. I’ll have an announcement soon (weeks) about the new name.

Well, happy 11 DIYSearch.

So yesterday I decided to send out a newsletter to all those folks who signed up at Diysearch. The mailing went quite well, and I got some very friendly responses from some kind souls, because well, there is kindness out there.

As a good and responsible webmaster, I provided an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the newsletter, because well, that’s just the right thing to do. And that link actually WORKS and it does REMOVE folks. But I get this response, we’ll call him “Service”.

“Service” decides in his or her own obvious years and years of internet experience that I am a spammer. I mean clearly they recognized the fact that the email address as the “from” was my actual email address (dpalmer at diysearch dot com) or that in the email headers I didn’t bounce the message around a dozen or so zombie machines to hide where it originated from. I mean, clearly anyone who has been on the net for 4 or maybe 5 hours would know that the lack of these things means that the message is clearly from a real person and not a spammer, right?

I mean anyone with 2 maybe possibly 3 IQ points could recognized that? Yes?

Well, I think I found one of those rare few who can’t quite figure this stuff out. Too bad really. I’m glad they are gone. I don’t suffer fools lightly. Its not in my nature.