Tags: this

13

sparkline

Sunday, February 19th, 2023

These were my jams

This Is My Jam was a lovely website. Created by Hannah and Matt in 2011, it ran until 2015, at which point they had to shut it down. But they made sure to shut it down with care and consideration.

In many ways, This Is My Jam was the antithesis of the prevailing Silicon Valley mindset. Instead of valuing growth and scale above all else, it was deliberately thoughtful. Rather than “maximising engagement”, it asked you to slow down and just share one thing: what piece of music are you really into right now? It was up to you to decide whether “right now” meant this year, this month, this week, or this day.

I used to post songs there sporadically. Here’s a round-up of the twelve songs I posted in 2013. There was always some reason for posting a particular piece of music.

I was reminded of This Is My Jam recently when I logged into Spotify (not something I do that often). As part of the site’s shutdown, you could export all your jams into a Spotify playlist. Here’s mine.

Listening back to these 50 songs all these years later gave me the warm fuzzies.

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2021

Winnie Lim » this website as a learning and reflection tool

I love reading about how—and why—people tinker with their personal sites. This resonates a lot.

This website is essentially a repository of my memories, lessons I’ve learnt, insights I’ve discovered, a changelog of my previous selves. Most people build a map of things they have learnt, I am building a map of how I have come to be, in case I may get lost again. Maybe someone else interested in a similar lonely path will feel less alone with my documented footprints. Maybe that someone else would be me in the future.

Oh, and Winnie, I can testify that having an “on this day” page is well worth it!

Tuesday, July 20th, 2021

Hope

My last long-distance trip before we were all grounded by The Situation was to San Francisco at the end of 2019. I attended Indie Web Camp while I was there, which gave me the opportunity to add a little something to my website: an “on this day” page.

I’m glad I did. While it’s probably of little interest to anyone else, I enjoy scrolling back to see how the same date unfolded over the years.

’Sfunny, when I look back at older journal entries they’re often written out of frustration, usually when something in the dev world is bugging me. But when I look back at all the links I’ve bookmarked the vibe is much more enthusiastic, like I’m excitedly pointing at something and saying “Check this out!” I feel like sentiment analyses of those two sections of my site would yield two different results.

But when I scroll down through my “on this day” page, it also feels like descending deeper into the dark waters of linkrot. For each year back in time, the probability of a link still working decreases until there’s nothing but decay.

Sadly this is nothing new. I’ve been lamenting the state of digital preservation for years now. More recently Jonathan Zittrain penned an article in The Atlantic on the topic:

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.

In one sense, linkrot is the price we pay for the web’s particular system of hypertext. We don’t have two-way linking, which means there’s no centralised repository of links which would be prohibitively complex to maintain. So when you want to link to something on the web, you just do it. An a element with an href attribute. That’s it. You don’t need to check with the owner of the resource you’re linking to. You don’t need to check with anyone. You have complete freedom to link to any URL you want to.

But it’s that same simple system that makes the act of linking a gamble. If the URL you’ve linked to goes away, you’ll have no way of knowing.

As I scroll down my “on this day” page, I come across more and more dead links that have been snapped off from the fabric of the web.

If I stop and think about it, it can get quite dispiriting. Why bother making hyperlinks at all? It’s only a matter of time until those links break.

And yet I still keep linking. I still keep pointing to things and saying “Check this out!” even though I know that over a long enough timescale, there’s little chance that the link will hold.

In a sense, every hyperlink on the World Wide Web is little act of hope. Even though I know that when I link to something, it probably won’t last, I still harbour that hope.

If hyperlinks are built on hope, and the web is made of hyperlinks, then in a way, the World Wide Web is quite literally made out of hope.

I like that.

Saturday, August 1st, 2020

this vs that - What is the difference between ___ and ___ in the front-end development?

A handy reference for explaining the differences between confusingly similar bits of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Friday, November 17th, 2017

This in JavaScript | Zell Liew

In the immortal words of Ultravox, this means nothing to me.

I’m filing this away for my future self for the next time I (inevitably) get confused about what this means in different JavaScript contexts.

Sunday, October 4th, 2015

adactio’s jams | This Is My Jam

I absolutely love the way that my archive is presented here. Matt and Hannah have set the bar in how to shut down a service in an honest, dignified way.

Monday, August 10th, 2015

Jam Preserves - The Jam Journal

It’s a real shame that Hannah and Matt are shutting down This Is My Jam—it’s such a lovely little service—but their reliance on ever-changing third-party APIs sounds like no fun, and the way they’re handling the shutdown is exemplary: the site is going into read-only mode, and of course all of your data is exportable.

Yahoo, Google, and other destroyers could learn a thing or two from this—things like “dignity” and “respect”.

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014

Meet the Online Tracking Device That is Virtually Impossible to Block - ProPublica

Well, thanks to the ass-hattery of AddThis, the use case of your site’s visitors switching off JavaScript for (legitimate) security reasons just became a lot more plausible.

But you’re using JavaScript as an enhancement, right? You’re not relying on it for core tasks, right?

Thursday, December 26th, 2013

That was my jam

Those lovely people at the jam factory have reprised their Jam Odyssey for 2013—this time it’s an underwater dive …through jam.

Looking back through my jams, I thought that they made for nice little snapshots of the year.

  1. : Meat Abstract by Therapy? …because apparently I had a dream about Therapy?
  2. : Jubilee Street by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds …because I had just been to the gig/rehearsal that Jessica earned us tickets to. That evening was definitely a musical highlight of the year.
  3. : Atlanta Lie Low by Robert Forster …because I was in Atlanta for An Event Apart.
  4. : Larsen B by British Sea Power …because I had just seen them play a gig (on their Brighton home turf) and this was the song they left us with.
  5. : Tramp The Dirt Down by Elvis Costello …because it was either this or Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead! (or maybe Margaret In A Guillotine). I had previously “jammed” it in August 2012, saying “Elvis Costello (Davy Spillane, Donal Lunny, and Steve Wickham) in 1989. Still waiting.”
  6. : It’s A Shame About Ray by The Lemonheads …because Ray Harryhausen died.
  7. : Summertime In England by Van Morrison …because it was a glorious Summer’s day and this was playing on the stereo in the coffee shop I popped into for my morning flat white.
  8. : Spaceteam by 100 Robots …because Jim borrowed my space helmet for the video.
  9. : Higgs Boson Blues by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds …because this was stuck in my head the whole time I was at hacking at CERN (most definitely a highlight of 2013).
  10. : Hey, Manhattan by Prefab Sprout …because I was in New York.
  11. : Pulsar by Vangelis …because I was writing about Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
  12. : Romeo Had Juliette by Lou Reed …because Lou Reed died, and also: this song is pure poetry.

I like This Is My Jam. On the one hand, it’s a low-maintenance little snippet of what’s happening right now. On the other hand, it makes for a lovely collage over time.

Or, as Matt put it back in 2010:

We’ve all been so distracted by The Now that we’ve hardly noticed the beautiful comet tails of personal history trailing in our wake.

Without deliberate planning, we have created amazing new tools for remembering. The real-time web might just be the most elaborate and widely-adopted architecture for self-archival ever created.

Tuesday, December 18th, 2012

adactio’s 2012 Jam Odyssey

This is simply wonderful! Get all of your This Is My Jam songs condensed down into one mix.

Here are all my song choices from 2012 compressed into three minutes. I love it!

Thursday, November 11th, 2010

All Programs Considered by Bill McKibben | The New York Review of Books

A great piece on the golden age of radio ...which is right now.

Friday, September 28th, 2007

.: This Is A Knife :.

Faceball on Channel 4. Too weird.

Saturday, March 3rd, 2007

YouTube - This 'n' That

Paul's voice has been sampled from his this'n'that magic trick and used for this stop-motion animation. Brilliant! I <3 mashup culture.