(Or: Let's All Join The Hive Mind)

Originally (and inaccurately) named, "Write Articles, Not Posts"

Recently I was writing about some updates I made to my website and how proud I am of them. Sadly, cohost had a bug that ate my entire post (rip, but these things happen.) Still, it gave me more time to think about what I call The New Posting Taxonomy

I do in fact have a website. I also have a cohost, and a twitter (which yes, I still use,) and a discord and a youtube channel. The way I write in each of these places, and the way I write different kinds of material, crosses a wide span of tone and intent. I have thought of a way to put words to these concepts.

These are the four classes of public, online communication:

Messages
Posts
Articles
Pages

They serve different purposes. Here's the breakdown.

Messages

Intended for a limited audience - even if a larger one sees them, it's not the plan. Usually on the shorter side, but not necessarily. Most importantly, they are contemporary, topical. They are about how you feel or think now - not meant to become part of the larger corpus of online knowledge, even if some people will see and internalize them.

One dashes off a message; it comes off the top of your head, with few thoughts about the audience or the future of the idea.

What you send on Discord are certainly messages, but tweets are also, generally, messages. The website is not architected for anything more than that, which is why it's so awkward and things go so poorly when anyone tries to use it for other purposes.

There are very few messages on Cohost, IME.

Posts

Intended for a wider audience - truly "public" in intent - and usually at least a couple paragraphs in length, and with some further thought about who will be reading and how they'll understand what you're trying to say - but still, generally, contemporary.

Posts are still mostly about the world as it exists right now, particularly your world as you see it, and are meant to be seen by people who are currently living a similar reality. They are not, usually, intended to become an enduring part of Online, but are still more likely to be read fully and considered, as well as shared, sometimes outside of their platform.

Most of what we write here are posts, IME.

Articles

Longer, by definition. Intended for a very wide audience, and expected to be shared around, often outside their platform. More effort is put into thorough explanation, and into fully nailing down a concept so that the article will stand as a capsule description even as the world changes. Written with some sense of timelessness in mind, because they may be read long after they're written.

It is hoped that articles will persist for a long time, but they are usually still part of a platform of some kind, and written with at least a vague demographic in mind. It is expected that they will be read by people who are "on" that platform, first and foremost.

Cohost supports and encourages the creation of articles. Although they're maybe 2-5% of what I see on here, they are virtually impossible on many other platforms.

Pages

While Cohost, for instance, allows us to write pretty long articles, it isn't a good home for pages. Pages are unlimited in length, complexity, and intent. We can all infer what messages, posts, and articles are about, but let's talk about pages.

Pages need to be part of a Website. Being on Cohost is like being on a website, but it's not quite the same. I can demonstrate with a fantastic example:

Sean Barrett's explanation of the 3D rendering engine of Thief: The Dark Project

Read this page, then click the home link at the bottom.

Oh Baby, Now That's A Website.

This is a prime specimen of website. A plain HTML page containing a series of links to... pages, which are about... topics.

Some are broad, some are specific, but all are written by one person, with no audience in mind, and no contemporary intent. These writings are not meant for any particular audience, or any given time, they are simply meant to document.

Particularly those of us who have been around since the early days of the Web will recognize this as the apogee of what it has to offer as a technology and concept. This is the ur-Site, the platonic ideal; a diamond in the rough that you stumble across on a Google search, or through a link from a forum or another site.

It draws a gasp when you realize what you've found. You know that you will be devouring it, in its entirety, however long it takes, one bite at a time.

The specific page I linked concerns a technology from 1998 that - if you'll allow me artistic license here - nobody cares about. It has little relevance to anything being done today. There is little demand for this info, nobody asked for it. It's not likely to get linked around, to get reposted, to spread.

For this reason, pages are raw. The author has no idea who will read them, so they're simply barely-filtered thoughts, written in the plainest possible way. The information on this website is what was in Sean's head; now you have it.

Each of the pages on this website is written for an audience consisting of humanity, and contemporary to the fullness of time. They were not created to obtain reactions or feedback or to make the author Known, but because they needed to exist. This person had thoughts, and wanted them to become part of the corpus of human knowledge.

To not write it down would be tragedy. This information was only in their head, it's unlike any other knowledge, and every unique human experience deserves to be recorded, durably.

The web offers a solution for that: You create a Webpage, you put it on a Website, and you set up autobill and let it run forever. It's not part of anyone else's business, it doesn't depend on anyone's whims, you are simply paying to contribute to the body of available information.

You create a Page on your Site when you want to cause a piece of your unique knowledge to become unstuck in time, as best as anyone can manage. A book may seem "more durable" - it doesn't go away if you stop paying for it monthly, right? - but that's not really true.

Assuming you bother to put out the outlay to have it printed, and convince people to buy it, it does require regular effort from them to choose to keep it as part of the clutter in their house, and to not throw it away when they move. And of course, houses flood and burn, and a book in a cardboard box in a basement can't be discovered by anyone other than the owner.

A $14/mo. web bill can go on at least as long as you do, and you don't need to shove it into anyone's hands. A webpage can be discovered at any moment, perhaps decades in the future, entirely by accident, or by offhand comment.

Maybe it'll go away once you're gone, but an enormous number of tilde sites and drivers-license-name.com's have stuck around for literally decades, and their links remain valid. No matter how robust a Posting website is, you cannot guarantee that your posts, at specific URLs, will be around and legible (in the exact form you originally wrote them) forever. But the effort to keep a website around consists of "occasionally send in a new credit card number," and in practice, they are remarkably long-lived.

And so, because they are so easy to simply continue having, once you have one, I will keep mine alive as long as I'm alive, because I need a place to put stuff that's not quite fit for Posts, or even Articles, stuff that is not contemporary at all, but which I know and seemingly nobody else does.

Many of my pages are unbelievably long-winded, some uses unique layouts that don't fit a Posting format, and most are of limited immediate interest. This means that I don't, generally, condense Pages into Posts or vice versa; there is often nothing contemporary about them, I simply desire to insert this information into the fossil record.

What I Put On Pages

I used to put stuff on my website because I didn't have a place to Post it. But even after Cohost came about, I found I was still writing Pages. For each one, I asked myself "should this be a post?" and the answer was always no. I have no doubt that they belong there, not here.

Some of that is because of their sheer size and format, but it's also because of the intent. I want this information to be found some day, much like the information I have found from long ago.

the explorer page

I created a review of every single version of Windows Explorer.

There are some factual errors in there, and it isn't in-depth. As the preamble explains, the goal was to summarize the gut response to each version, the "first two minutes" reaction you'd have if you used every version of Windows and Reacted to the file exploring experience each time you upgraded.

This article would not have worked here, or any other dynamic website. It's too structured, requires too much tight control of screen space. It needed a dedicated, handcrafted .html file, and it has no contemporary relevance.

To my knowledge, nobody else has done anything like this before or since. Toastytech gets the closest, but that guy has insufferable boomer voice.

I think I did a pretty good job of illustrating what early Windows file management is like in comparison to what we have now, and provided a summary of Microsoft's changing opinions about file management over the years.

the dos on windows page

I wrote a similar overview of the experience of running DOS apps inside every version of Windows.

Again, I had never seen this done before and I doubt anyone ever bothered. It's useless information - by the time most people were using the web, the awkwardness of pre-95 DOS emulation* was dead and buried. Had you asked anyone in 1998 "what was running DOS apps on windows 3 like", they would probably have shrugged at you, having wiped the information from their brain once it became irrelevant.

And 95 did make it utterly irrelevant - the quality of its DOS emulation* was so good that anyone who wanted to do that would have been a fool to not upgrade immediately. Even the last versions of Win 3.x had rough edges when it came to running DOS apps - 95 simply perfected it.

* It's not really emulation, but you can read the page for details on that.

the fm towns pages

I wrote two pages about the FM Towns: One about the OS and one about emulating it.

These were a response to this information not being documented at all elsewhere. The English-speaking web simply had no information at that time (and maybe still) about the Towns. Again, why bother? It's a dead, Japan-only platform that hosted largely arcade ports, with a wacky half-ass OS, and the only emulator is quarter-ass.

But if you wanted to look into this yourself, you would have had a real hell of a time getting started. It's so tedious - it took me days to figure out how to get it to work at all "reliably" or to understand what I was looking at. You really can't do anything without knowing all this stuff.

And I solved that problem. Assuming you find my page (it's result #2 on google for "emulating fm towns" for me, ymmv) you will be able to get started, and avoid all the pitfalls of the broken emulator that I had to discover. I even frontloaded all the effort of translating many of the OS menus and options.

This is an important type of Page, to me: These are not comprehensive articles written by a true expert, but simply an archive of my experiences, so you don't have to repeat them. My god, if only more people would do this.

It's what we used to rely on to make Linux usable in the 90s; these tilde pages, where people simply wrote down what worked for them. They're how we learned that such-and-such package in Red Hat 7.1 was broken and required a manual symlink yada yada to fix.

Every page of this sort was a godsend to us, and while the Towns may be a minor subject, I have nonetheless filled a gap in a similar way, and it will remain filled for many years.

And if you don't want to go through the whole process of discovering the system yourself, I've also created a tour of the OS. The games are mostly just arcade ports so there's not much point in reviewing each one, but you can see what the system software and experience were like, perhaps more conveniently than with a youtube video.

the virtualization guides

I made articles about how to get OS/2 and Solaris 2.6 running in emulation (and, to an extent, real hardware.)

Again, this is because nobody else had covered these in a way that seemed approachable to me. I did the same as with the Towns: I wrote down exactly what I did, all the foibles and pitfalls I experienced, so that if you're interested in these platforms, you can just get started, without wasting time beating your head against the desk.

I went through and did each version of OS/2 that I could. This is another thing that wouldn't really fit on a Posting site - every individual version, not just one that I felt would be most interesting or representative. It's tedious, meticulous, and space-filling to do each of these individually, but if this is what you've decided to fixate on for a couple weeks, you will (I hope) find the info invaluable in keeping you focused on the actual exploration of these systems, rather than figuring out the tedious problems of emulators.

And unlike the Towns, which is largely games-focused, these OS' are app-focused - so I added suggestions to both articles on apps you can try, and places to find software, so you aren't left going "okay, it's running- now what?"

the dialup guides

I wrote an article on how to set up dialup between two computers without a phone line, and a general primer on the PPP protocol.

When I was trying to test dialup stuff at home I discovered that virtually nobody had addressed this. There were no guides I could find on how to dial between two machines without seriously janky shit, often involving Asterisk, or that irritating suggestion that you "just" use a flag that tells your modem to connect without dialing.* I came up with an approach that works for a casual user who doesn't have 180 hours to burn to figure out how to make Asterisk work.

* That flag is not universally supported by modems, many apps can't request it, and it's boring as hell. If you're doing dialup without dialing, you're just using a shitty serial cable.

Once I figured it out, it was important that I put it up for everyone, so others wouldn't have to beat their head against the desk like I did. That's also why I wrote a PPP primer.

You can literally buy an O'Reilly book on this - I did, in fact, but most people never will, and all summaries of PPP online are unintelligible. They make assumptions about the users domain knowledge, or don't describe things in sufficient depth, or expect that you're planning on becoming a network engineer.

I needed to learn how PPP worked in order to figure out why my Mac couldn't dial up to my Windows RAS. Once I was done, again, I wanted to help others avoid all the infuriating, "okay I get that I need this feature Usually, but how do I tell if I need this feature, and literally What Is It Doing" stuff that I had to go through.

Again, these can be found on Google by simple searches for the subject matter.

I Am Proud Of My Website, As We All Should Be

Someday, I know all my pages will be read by people who will be thrilled that they found them, even if they don't use the information on them for something specific. All the info is timeless, I hope. It's simply a pile of experiences I had, embedded in amber.

Pages are not the ideal form of information, but as you can tell (given that 90% of this article is about them) I think they serve an important purpose, and we shouldn't let ourselves think that they're obsolete. Cohost offers us a "return" to a more livejournal-y era, but let's not forget that even during the LJ era, websites thrived.

I've often known people who wanted to make a website, but couldn't figure out what to put there. I hope this helps you figure it out, because we all have things to say that go best on Pages, as well as things that go best in Posts or Articles.

Consume Cohost, and all other websites, as part of a balanced breakfast!

Edited once since posting, to clarify some points and move some paragraphs around.

Moo 🌸

@Moo

lesbrarian goat gal

a new taxonomy for the 21st century