John Zeitler

Thoughts on the weekend past are coming on Thursday, as per what is becoming my usual idiom.

Way, way back in the early days of the World Wide Web, back before there was more to the internet than just the WWW, the concept of a “home page” was a necessary conceit that stemmed from the medium’s predominant usage in campus computer labs. Browsers did offer bookmarks, but since you weren’t guaranteed to get the same computer each time, there was little point in saving bookmarks. The home page began as a way for a user to store hyperlinks to their most favored sites, for easy access when they weren’t at “their” computer. My first few web sites were dedicated to this effort, and I made tremendous strides in learning HTML and Javascript so that I could have an easy, no-thinking-required morning link list.

Nowadays, nobody even uses the term “home page”; the idea itself is outmoded as browsers offer bookmark syncing capabilities and browsing session restoration. There are huge services dedicated to keeping your bookmarks completely accessible, thus obviating the need for you to learn HTML and have hosting space set up. Personal hosting sites are vanishingly rare since the collapse of GeoCities, their purposes having been melded into social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter; their most common use case even at the end– a weblog– is now handled far more elegantly by services like WordPress and Blogger.

I maintained a links page on my old site for just shy of about nine years now; it went live at 7p on Thursday, April 24th, 2003. At some point this month– likely by the time you read this– that will have ended, as I’m migrating my bookmark list to iCloud. The Links page on the old TFO.net site, which remained an open-secret since the 2009 move to this domain, will be deleted, as it doesn’t serve any purpose anymore and is prohibitively difficult to maintain. I’ll talk a little bit tomorrow on why that is.