2022-11-22
I updated my webpage with a small little project of mine called
This Day On The Internet. Finding information on the internet by
chronological order has always been harder than it should be. For
example, if you wanted to find the Top youtube videos from 2 weeks
ago, you'd be hardpressed to find an easy way to do that. This is
true even for news articles from major news websites like CNN.
In the pre-internet era, all of our latest news and popular trends
were organized chronologically. The newspaper and the magazine
were literal snapshots in time of the latest trends and hottest
cultural issues. I wanted to create the digial equivalent of a
stack of newspaper front pages.
Fortunately we do have the wayback machine from archive.org but
alas, the Wayback Machine is itself pretty tedious to use and only
really works one site at a time. I really wanted to have a simple
HTML archive just like the early days of the Internet.
No matter how technology changes, basic HTML webpages that contain
nothing but text and links will always be available to any interested
future netizens out there.
Another issue is of course infinite vastness of content sources on
the Internet. I could only choose an infinitesimally small set of
content sources for my snapshots. Since I'm from the USA, the
archive will be biased towards American English content sources.
But I hope the project will inspire other people to start archiving
their own cultural zeitgeist in simple HTML webpages.
http://canfood.decsystem.org/thisday/
