I've tried so many different CMS this year. For now I would like to get back to writing, creating art and all the other things I like about having a site. I'm putting software on hold for awhile.

Meanwhile, I've lost the few posts I did have here so I am back to the start with this site. Not a bad thing since I mainly wanted it for the domain itself. If I were less of a domain shopper I would have everything here, on this domain. But, I don't. Once I get those domains I feel I should be doing something with them.

I get a lot of ideas and I tend to be impulsive.

I'm no longer sure when I originally wrote this. It may have been around 2010. I did leave for years and then came back in 2016, I think. But, the whole thing was dumped by AOL (Verizon/AOL) and became Curlie. You can visit the directory, still being updated by volunteers, at the new site. Curlie.org

It stopped being fun or interesting. Tired of getting email from sploggers who think I should list their great site full of ads. Tired of attitude from editors who don't seem to care about the sites they edit just being right or better than anyone else. I salute the old Dmoz and the people I knew then. It's not here any more and now neither am I.

I joined the Open Directory Project in November of 1998 so November of 2007 seems like a good time to leave. Sort of rounding out the date. I really enjoyed the first few years. The years after that were kind of like dealing with a bitchy old relative you just seem stuck with for some reason. I couldn't quite give up being an editor. I loved finding new sites, new ideas and new things to try and learn about on my own. But, the pettiness and back biting was always there. I felt I was always being judged and nit picked at. I had not felt appreciated or welcome even for a long time.

So now I'm gone. Maybe I will amass my own mini directory for the rural exploration sites. Not sure I want to take on another project though. I don't need to. I have the Flickr group and that is enough. It's really all I wanted, a local bunch to share photos and locations and maybe get together for coffee. So, it's all good.

A good time to leave when the categories I cared about most have pretty much fallen into dust or splog. Writers Resources is mainly splog, not much of real quality there any more. ASCII Art is covered in dust bunnies. It gets me sadder each time I have to delete an old listing gone by the wayside. Urban exploration is growing but I was told by another editor that I don't know what I'm doing there. She deleted a bunch of subcategories and listings I had done. That rankled me.

Anyway, the end of the Dmoz era has cometh upon me. I won't miss it. I won't look back. I sure won't miss the old shedragon moniker either! I outlived that several years ago. :)

I'm going back to working with text files again and start working with pdf. A webzine, rather than a blog. Well, a webzine as a working name.

Running a blog has become ruined with marketing and pressure to conform. I've always liked doing things my own way. Following all the "rules" for bloggers means putting marketing first. I don't want to do that. Yet, each time I try to get working on my sites again there is all that stuff telling everyone how to do everything better, almost always involving SEO and marketing. I don't want to live like everything is for sale. I don't want to blog that way either. So, blogging is out.

Of course, that means deciding what blogging actually is and what I want to do next. Once upon a time it was a web log, keeping dated entries about changes made to your projects on the web. Some personal posts became sprinkled in and next thing you had the personal online journal. Blogs came from that, later. Dated entries were the key to what was a blog and what was not. That is so lost these days, there are blogs which don't want to post dates at all. They call it evergreen. I call it, not a blog.

I have a lot of old content to merge with something new. Once I take it out of CMS software I won't have to keep trying to find ways to make it display for software, just the txt or pdf file type. That will be a LOT easier.

I'm keeping something blog-like to post things I find along the way, in niche and topical blogish displays. Likely on Blogger because I can use Open Live Writer to create the post and then filter it to whichever site I want it to show up on. They will be content curation sites, not blogs. I can post links to niche sources in the sidebars, as I find good links. But, dates, marketing, and professional templates won't be important.

I knew Joan from the newsgroup but I have not found her online since she left the ASCII art newsgroup/ community. I think of her often, at least as often as I still see her ASCII art ripped off online. She has a style I can almost always spot, even if someone has removed or changed the artist initials with her art.

Her kids will be grown up now and she won’t be fighting for computer time. I hope life has gone along well for her, where ever she is.

Joan G. Stark’s Original ASCII

Believe it or not, I “discovered” ASCII art in winter of 1995. I think I saw a tiny bicycle made in ascii characters and was totally amazed by it. I joked that someone must have had too much time on their hands! But still I was in awe of it… I didn’t even know what it was called. After e-mailing several friends, I found out that it was called “ASCII art”. It was then that I found the USENET newsgroup alt.ascii-art and started lurking to find more of these computer pictures.

I then started collecting as much of the ASCII art as I could. I began wandering through the internet and realized that there was way too much to save. I would forget my idea of having a huge collection… I know where to find the pictures if I want something.

Being a “crafty” type person, I decided that I would try to make the ASCII pictures myself. I’ve always like to doodle on paper, so I figured it couldn’t be that much different. My first project was to make a signature for me to use. I started diddling around with the keyboard in May/June of 1996 by doing lettering. Someone then told me about “FIGLET”. For those of you who don’t know, FIGLET is a computer program that creates fancy lettering from text. Hearing about figlet took the thrill away from making the fonts- I could spend an hour creating an alphabet by hand and someone else could just press a computer key and have the letters pop up “pre-made”.

And so I went on to the pictures… I know that there are programs available to create ASCII art — (I don’t know that much about them…) — but the programs usually create solid-type ASCII art. Even then, the pictures still are pretty rough and need touch-ups to make them aesthetically correct. I have collected some conversion software information from alt.ascii-art and offer them to you– no guarantees– .

I make the line-style ASCII pictures and I don’t believe that there are programs for this style. Basically I sit down at the keyboard and start typing.

OK– so I can’t consider myself a “newbie” at ASCII art any more. The honeymoon is over! I’ve been making the pics since 1996. Some people are anticipating my “burn-out”– but I continue to make the ASCII art pictures and I still look forward to improving. I’d like to be able to look at each of my creations and say “wow!”– there are some that I like a lot and there are some that I consider “ok”. Most of the crummy ones have met their demise at the hands of the delete button. Despite this, I’ve included some of my early works in this gallery so you can see how my artwork has evolved. Perhaps I may inspire other budding ascii artists…

I am just amazed at all ASCII artwork. There are a limited number of characters available on the keyboard and they are all fixed. Considering this fact, it is truly remarkable that there are so many different ASCII art pictures.

I don’t know how long ASCII art has been around. I’ve been told that it dates back at least to the 1960s when computers consisted only of large main frames. There were no PCs and no monitors. Transmissions were done through terminals that were very much like electric typewriters. Games and pictures were done in ASCII. (Remember the original “Zork”?) Some of the pictures passed around then are still being passed around today. See History of ASCII Art.

For me, the ASCII art is still pretty new … although I remember as a kid, my father would take me to work with him on an occasional Saturday. While there, I would play on the secretary’s typewriter and make pictures on a sheet of paper using commas and lines– my “first” ASCII drawings!. (I would also link all of her paper clips together– shhh, don’t tell my dad!). I had a lot of fun those weekend mornings… I guess you could say that I’ve been making text art — even before computers! :)

But times have changed! Gone are the typewriters, papers, and carbon copies. I doodle as I did as a child… but now I don’t need a new sheet of paper or white-out when I make a mistake. Sigh… and my children have already connected my paper clips together! :( But that’s OK, I don’t need them! :) I just have to fight the kids for computer time!

Source: About Joan Stark

So much is still lost, gone and unretrievable. Software changes, sites that close with no/little notice, people deciding what does matter and what does not based on what seemed to matter at that time. I've lost quite a lot of what I have written over the years I've been online. The Wayback Machine has some of it. Not all. Of course, not every word, thought, image, or news has value worth keeping for however long. But, once its gone it isn't likely to be found again.

It is still funny, in an interesting way, that all of it, saved or not, is just code. The science of having so much created based on 1 and 0 is still amazing.

In the 01990s, when we first started really talking about the issues of digital storage media and file format obsolescence, it was almost as if we were caught with our pants down. We hadn’t truly been thinking about this as a problem; we as a civilization weren’t prepared for the challenges it posed. We soon realized, however, that digital documents have their own complex fragility and maintaining access to digitally encoded information over the long-term may be more challenging than the analog. There was a flurry of activity across the globe, and while the topic faded from the headlines, the flurry of activity continued and has slowly and steadily gained momentum.

Source: #nodigitaldarkage? — Blog of the Long Now - Heather Ryan.