!Web services I used and liked
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agk's diary
7 May 2024 @ 20:01 UTC
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written on GPD Win 1
while first daughter naps
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I got an email from the 25-year-old tech collective
Riseup today about their history. Out of fondness
inspired by the email, here are web services I've
liked:
1998 I think was when I made an Angelfire website,
an online presence for my teenaged goth 'zine
publishing concern. When I got in trouble for
one of my 'zines, had to shred all the copies
left in my inventory and replace my website
with an apology page, I made a minimalist-
styled website on nettrash.
Both are cool to look back on, fragments that
survived, anyway. I had fun making gifs pixel
by pixel for my Angelfire site, and hosted a
cool original story I have to put in print,
brutal true memoir of '90s girlhood by one of
my friends, emailed chapter by chapter. The
nettrash website was mirrored on another free
webhost. It had an active message board,
creative writing, and ICQ conversation logs.
It was a web community for my friends.
2001 til 2020 I subscribed to a FindMail/eGroups/
Yahoo! Groups email group. In the early 2000s,
it was the reason I used computers. I had a
@disinfo.net email account, then FastMail. A
group of protest medics announced upcoming
actions, planned support, debriefed after, and
developed protocols and health education on
the list.
I looked at it from library computers as I
rode buses, hitchiked, and later trainhopped
around the country. It gave me where to go to
and kept me connected to a community memory.
2006 Wikia was a MediaWiki wikifarm for fandoms. I
started a wiki for protest medics when the old
action-medical.net domain name lapsed. It was
adjunct to the email list, and used for
archiving protocols and history, and writing
new protocols. It lasted til 2018, I think.
I love wikis, and have also hosted them on
farms I liked better than wikia: wikidot and
branchable. But the medic wiki drew the best
community and had the highest profile. People
don't look at websites anymore.
2009 I worked some dispatch shifts, dispatching
medics at a large convergence via twitter. It
was a refinement of txtmob, a service developed
for protesters at the 2004 Republican National
Convention. It let you run something like an
email list over sms text messages, and saved
from renting radios and a repeater, because
most people had cellphones (not smartphones).
The dispatcher added participants to a list or
they sent a request text message to shortcode
40404. Inbound messages went to dispatch, who
read them for situational awareness and only
released messages for mass rebroadcast or
passed messages to specific teams as approp-
riate. Dispatch shared a blackberry I think,
field medics had flip or candybar phones.
Everyone had radio discipline.
2010 I used Google Wave as a communications suite
for an organization operating in the aftermath
of the Macondo blowout/Gulf of Mexico oil
spill. My friend sent me an invite.
I liked the etherpad-like ability to simult-
aneously collaboratively edit, or thread like
email exchanges. Our photographer liked being
able to send her pictures. I remember doing
collaborative mapping too, of oil slick
dispersion, wildlife/marsh grass oiling, etc.
2011 Riseup, the friends who sent the email which
sent me on this trip down memory lane, wrote
web 2.0 software called crabgrass. They hosted
an instance at we.riseup.net. It worked well
enough when we used it for the business of
Occupy Wall Street's medics.
Budgets, meeting minutes, inventory, graphics
(like templates for insignia), and even some
online decision-making were done on it. There
was a learning curve, but it served us during
the occupation of Zucotti Park in New York
City and for the following year of marches,
dispersed occupations, squats, mass housing.
2018 I used a platform called sandstorm for field-
work in central Appalachia to develop a new
federally-supported long-distance bike route.
Sandstorm hosts independent web applications,
but handles security policies and a cool
approach to authorization.
We developed documents in etherpads, kept
spreadsheets, a rocket chat, uploaded photos,
etc into a shared workspace that had enough in
common with the Google Suite which was
becoming widely used that my teammates didn't
mind it much. I found it really easy to admin-
istrate, and our data was ours.
Some friends who ran a big bail fund for
arrested activists hosted a spreadsheet on a
sandstorm instance and suffered one catast-
rophic data loss. Making backups is easy on
sandstorm, but they didn't have a recent one,
so abandoned the platform.
2020 I made an sdf account. I've used webpages here
for a million things: public "calling card",
resume host, event planning, "handouts" or
slideshows for when I teach, budgeting, to-do
lists and calendering. I love my gopher hole.
I like the email and bboard, and periodically
dip into radio, voip, and com.
I did a lot offline. Typewriters in the '90s, mail,
scissors, scotch tape, and photocopies at least
once a week even now, whiteboards and sticky notes
to teach, manage research, or disaster management
dispatch or incident command, clipboards hung on
nails, pen and paper drafts, singing while I cook,
listening to the radio, reading books.
