Stuff I miss

Some online stuff that once was, that I miss now:

- Webrings. Back in the day there used to be a free-knitting-patterns webring. Yes, I know much of that function has been subsumed by Ravelry, but I remember the late 1990s, when I sat in my graduate-student office, bored, waiting for an analysis to run (or waiting on someone else to do something), I could go and look and just keep clicking the "next site" button - and tour through a lot of different old-school "personal" pages.

Some were really pretty static and never changed; others were kind of like proto-weblogs. Some were truly personal sites in the sense of "these are patterns my grandma wrote out for me and I've transcribed them online for you;" others were "I sell yarn that will work with these patterns" or "I also have different kits/patterns for sale"

The "old web" (of the late 1990s) was less-slick and more crunchy but it also felt more...personal, somehow. It was less commercialized. (Oh, there were ads, including lots of truly heinous pop-ups, which was what pop-up blockers and adblockers were invented to fight off).

And yes, there were people who used eye-searing color combinations, or those stupid add-on cursor-transforms so your cursor transformed into a daisy or a teddy bear or something (and often didn't work), or the people who had confetti or snow animations, or bad MIDI music and yet....all those things, annoying as they could be, had their charms. And now, as I look at some of the commercialized, minimalist sites, I do kind of long for a MIDI background or some kind of weird electric-rainbow palette. Because a lot of times those blandishments showed a certain exuberance on the part of the webdesigner - the person seemed to actually be having fun and doing what *they* wanted, rather than what they felt like the "majority" of those likely to click on them might want. (And yes, I know: all those things I listed are probably nightmares for accessibility; even for me, some of the weird color combinations messed badly with my not-altogether-corrected astigmatism).

Also I realize now: SEO was probably not a thing back then, and so nobody cared. People did their own stuff more when "monetization" was not such a thing, or when getting the biggest number of eyeballs possible was the goal.

Maybe there's a lesson there: that stuff is more individual and unique when you're less worried about what "appeals" to people other than you. I know I sometimes, in my day-to-day life, "erase" some of the "weirder" parts of myself....and maybe I suffer a little bit for that.

- Some of the yarn selling sites. I used to use both eKnitter (which I think is long-gone) and Elann (which I think still exists, but has gone exclusively to selling their "own" lines of yarn, rather than closeouts - which was what I used to love them for). Elann used to put up their new offerings, as I remember, on Monday mornings, and it was always a surprise as to what they had - sometimes it was really quite a nice yarn (near-luxury) for a good price. A lot of the yarn I had in my earlier days of knitting came from them.

And Patternworks, though I knew them first as a catalog-mail-order company, and they were the first place I ordered yarn from.

- Personal craft-blogs being a more active thing. I've bemoaned that a lot. Now, it seems, there are a few left - either people who use it for promotion of books/yarn/instruction they sell, or, the few blockhead* holdouts like me who write them for fun.


(*In the sense of Sam'l Johnson: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money")

I also miss more-wide-commenting on blogs, the little discussions that sometimes got going.

(Yes, blogs as a thing do still exist but it seems there are FAR fewer craft-related blogs than there used to be. Mine isn't even all that craft-related any more, given other time -pressures in my life. There are a few true weblogs out there still - where there are wide-ranging links and commentary on things (I read a few of those) and there are an awful lot of political blogs (which I generally don't read) but a lot of the specific-interest blogs - well, they declined a lot when FB started to become a thing, or so it seemed, thought maybe that was coincidental).

- I also remember Usenet, and for a while I was a member of some of the discussion groups on there (I think Knitlist started out there, as did the Socknitters group). It was entirely text-based, and you could either just log in and read, or, I think you could also get a daily-digest of posts e-mailed to you (at least for the less-active groups). I remember some of the "rules" - that you "lurked" (read without posting) for a week to a month (depending on the group) so you understood the culture of the group and how they operated. And that there were some topics that were off-limits. And the whole idea of "flaming" and "flame wars" (arguments, usually interlarded with insults) came from there. (Though I don't remember a lot of flame wars in the groups where I hung out.)

I suppose people have always been people. Maybe in some of the more political groups, or once that were about more controversial topics, there was a lot of flaming.

- Woolworks. Woolworks.org was the first knitting website I used - I remember the first pair of socks I knitted (I think it was something like "Judy's two-strand socks," and I can't even easily find a link to that pattern online now). Woolworks was a very stable site, quiet, but they had a compendium of free patterns (ASCII based, so easy to print out, even if you just had a crummy dot-matrix printer).

Woolworks really was one of the unsung (I think) vanguards of the knitting renaissance that started in the late 1990s. (Knitting became popular again then, I think because the nascent Web allowed more sharing and also the beginnings of online shopping: important to those of us living in areas with few or no yarn shops).

And yes, from having gone through it myself, I DO think 1997 or so was when knitting started to become popular again, and not "post September 11 2001" as some people claim. Oh, yes, perhaps for some people, seeking comfort after that happening, they realized the importance of crafts in their life (or realized it again), but a lot of us were knitting (or knitting again) well before that time.

- Heh, also, my comment about "easily printable patterns done in ASCII," now I think of all the silly ASCII art people made and shared - for a few years I had a printout of Homer Simpson doing one of his "Mmmmm" lines, rendered in ASCII, taped up over my desk in grad school.

I suppose the silly things (like the sign-rabbit and the "In this house we" house) and the various things like the Emoji Cowboy are direct descendants of that.

I dunno. When I first started using the WWW, back around 1995 or so, things were crunchier and smaller and uglier....but also more-personal, somehow. Facebook and similar didn't exist and so hadn't captured all the attention, there was no idea of "optimizing" who found your site....it was very different from what it is now. (I also suspect outages - like the Gmail and Youtube outages of June 2, caused less consternation. I've seen people actually threaten legal action on Flickr's help page when Flickr goes down, though I suppose some people low-level depend on them for their livelihood, but Flickr isn't *intentionally* breaking itself....)