Side note: I keep conjuring a blog post about my long path through digital storytelling, my story of storytelling, and it gets so long in my head that I can see piecing together from separate posts, which I am now tagging here as storystory. This plan may go nowhere.

The thing I took away was how they framed the social media that shaped me- television, and how the shows Lost and Wired which were “new” in 2008, were smashing to formula of episodes of stand along stories that began and ended in 30 or 60 minute chunks, for a plot structure that was larger, more complex, ore organic.

I checked my blog notes and indeed I had a blog post! But I went to look at at, and it seemed so skimpy… all text, maybe 2 links, one fuzzy photo.

I mean who really cares if I have an 18 year old skimpy blog post? Me! I have had a thing when I find older posts of doing a bit of quick cleanup, fixing broken links, adding missing ones, doing a better job of categorizing — the bulk of my posts, 3270 of them, are in a default blog pile category as for many years I just lobbed them on the pile. Also, a vast majority of my posts lack decent featured images because in the theme I ran for a lon stretch, it grabbed the first image in a post for the front page view, but mostly did not define them natively in WordPress as feature images.

Now it looks and links more and better

plus it includes some update notes at the end. The big thing that happened was I had but one photo in the post, one I took from the audience likely with a low resolution pocket Canon camera. I thought and expected I had more in my flickr stream, and I did! Notable I had a few of the visual notes that were done there live by someone who signed the corner as Brightspot Interactive Design… an ad a URL to a blog eyescience.blogspot.com Thar be an invisible link I can make, and the blog still exists! Why, I dunno, but I do care.

There I see this was the work of Sunni Brown who did move to her own domain (still there, and another day for exploring there). But back on that blogspot and because I can follow the sidebar links to posts for March 2008 the month when SXSWi happened, I can find the full image of the graphic notes.

Here’s where it got interesting, seeing the posts/visual notes from other main sessions:

•  Frank Warren and the PostSecret Project – I remember this one it was a fantastic example of analog meets digital / real storytelling — and in 2026, 18 years later, it’s still going strong.
• Jane McGonigal – yes, this was another session I remember well, AvantGames and all, virtual reality.

I had noted these as well as other sessions I saw in one longer conference post- including I am rpetty sure the first time I saw Kathy Sierra speak.

But back on the Sunni Brown notes, I saw a keynote from someone who’s session was so not memorable I did not mention it. Maybe the guy went nowhere:

• Mark Zuckerberg Keynote – I wonder if I went, bit reading the post, I do remember the booing of the moderator, though I am not sure for what. So this session registers little memory cells, even then the dude gave me the creeps

In fact the only sign of this was a tshirt I snapped a picture of- y’all remmeber all the “poking”?

I can’t explain why I spent a chunk of time digging around and updating an 18 year olf blog post. Sure If I want to just generate a memory, I can ask a machine for a summary of the Jenkins / Johnson session, but I’d rather rekindle and reconnect my own lived experiences.

Because their talk did fire up the idea in my of complex web narratives, of getting beyond “stories” as a listing of events or even a single thread. It was part of the path I was on in pushing and playing with web based storytelling.

And more… I was there. This was easily one of the most exciting conference experiences I had, and stands out far from the mundane education ones I spent most of my time at. All of the sessions were panels, discussions, not talking over pictures of text.

Plus they had a huge open corner space in the conference space with one of the biggest piles of legos strewn about I have ever seen, leading someone to take time to express themselves:

That was the long ago then, and now the blog post is that much better. I only have about 3000 more to update.

Featured Image: A mashup of the smashed TV form Blow Up Your TV plus a snag of a poster from eBay, all collaged together by me and not JenAI, and pretty much illegal use of images. Sue me.

In today’s fast-paced world, it is important to note that I will delve into showcasing and unprecedented landscape of domain cleanup (I am tossing in all the LLM buzzphrases just to play with you), ignore this sentence, please).

But seeing the notice of upcoming automated domain renewals coming in, I started thinking, why do I need these? I see the very first one I bought back in 1997 dommy.com coming up on 29 years old was up for renewal, plus 3 more this month. Much as I loathe breaking links, let’s not kid myself, when was the last time anyone was linking to my web clients form the late 1990s? I decided I’d rather maintain my own archive, make sure my own links are alive, leave the rest to be combed through in the Internet Archive.

So I am letting four of them lapse this month, and can see letting more go this year. The main ones I will keep of course is the cogdogblog.com fleet (a bunch of subdomains) and another pile of them will be clustered to my personal vanity domain cog.dog I do have a few old project sites I have kept going but I have turned off the domain auto renew so I can move the old barges.

The array of steps I have been doing this week include:

• A few WordPress sites (subdomains too) clones to live in one of my main keeper domains. Easy to do with the Reclaim Hosting Installatron manager.
• Some WordPress sites not ever needing updates I am archving as static HTML sites using my venerable Mac OSX Tool Site Sucker (see Archiving Old WordPress Sites as Static HTML)
  • There is a bit of directory play, since the file structure includes meta media like CSS, remote javascript, Google fonts, so all the site files sit one directory in. I have been setting up an htaccess rule to redirect requests into the sub directory.
• Self-contained sites (HTML, PHP, CSS, etc) just moved of set to be pointed to within one of my subdomains.
• Before the domains expire, I am setting up HTTP redirects to new locations, just in the long shot they get crawled by web search.
• I have been happy with the Wayback Link Fixer plugin that is doing a great job of replacing broken links in my posts to point to copies in the Internet Archive.
  • I found useful the extra links you get for looking at a domain’s snapshots in the internet archive, the usual result is the timeline view say for cogdogblog.com the other links across the top I have never looked at, and you can see the URL is easy to construct or set up in a spreadsheet.
  • The summary view indicates how many snapshots by mime type, the summary for cogdogblog.com https://web.archive.org/details/https://cogdogblog.com/ indicates it has snagged some 48000 URLs in my blog and over 51000 images. Yikes.
  • And you can dice and slice specifically what URLs on my domain have been archived via https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://cogdogblog.com/*
• And to keep my own links used updated on this blog, making use of the Better Find and Replace WordPress plugin to edit links in the database to point to new locations.

As I work through this, there are snags and things will be broken, still I am convinced no one will know. I am doing this for me.

Here comes The Broom.

dommy.com (1997)

• What/Why: I was in my early years of web development at the Maricopa Community Colleges. One faculty member I worked with on a project recommended me to her husband who needed a web site for his organization. I used it as a place to refer anyone who asked for help with a web site, nearly all the clients I barely remember. I also wanted to have it for an email address I could use,
• The Name: Indeed the dog theme was there early- “Dommy” was the nickname of my Dalmatian Dominoe. Years later someone emailed to let me know that that “dommy: in her realm of “dominatrix” meant “dominant mommy” Shrug
• The Site: A hodgepodge of 1990s web layout (yes tables!) some crude PHP and Javascript. But it meant mostly moving the site was just moving files.
• Buried Down Deep: There is a ton of stuff tucked away, the only means to discover os poking around the directory structure.
  • alan’s wacky weird web: This was my “home page” on the web servers I ran 1993-2006 at the Maricopa Community Colleges, just moved to me own domain when I left the system, knowing it would not be maintained.
  • Alan’s bike to Work Page: Notes and details of the years I was a bicycle commuter.
  • A History of Dad: Tribute to my father created after he passed away in 2001
  • I Hate Running: Web site made for a few years of running half and sort of full marathons; originally run in WordPress, later archived to static HTML
  • We pee on spammers: Oh how naively just annoying email spam was back then
  • Alan’s NoJava Shop: Back in my glory days of web development with Macromedia Director, this was my stand against all the hype of Java
• Internet Archive:
  • By date: Saved 366 times between December 5, 1998 and March 27, 2026.
  • URLs: 3,842 URLs have been captured 
  • Summary: 14,932 web page captures; 5,765 image captures

cogdog.casa (2015)

• What/Why: I am fuzzy why I set up this domain, mainly in the fun times of all the top new TLD and a place just to hang some various small use and experimental sites. No reason why they can hang elsewhere in my other domains
• The Name: Coming off of my UDG Agora project time I was feeling the Spanish spirit.
• The Site: The top of the domain was meant just to stand there, not to be a site in itself. Made of just simple HTML, CSS, and the nifty jQuery Backstretch for filling the background with an image.
• Buried Down Deep: Not much. I had a demo site of suggestions I used when starting my work with OEGlobal in 2020, let that one drift away. The main ones I migrated were
  • Puerto Rico Connection podcast, a WordPress site formerly at prconnection.cogdog.casa moved to prconnection.cog.dog. If I can ever convince Antonio Vantaggiato to join me in the studio, I am game to top the last episode published by robots
  • CogDog Showtime a WordPress multisite formerly at show.cogdog.casa exported with Site Sucker to HTML at https://showtime.cog.dog/. This was a fleet of 12 web presentations for stuff done 2015-2022, many of them done with my SPLOTpoint theme but. few others with my WordPress Calling Card themes. This was an interesting experiment to do an entire multisite with Site Sucker; it only got 5 because not all of them were linked from the main starting site. Lesson learned for doing this is to get links to all subsites on the main entry one.
• Internet Archive: – note not relevant for main domain since it had no external links.
  • The Puerto Rico Connection
    • By date: Saved 40 times between January 25, 2019 and April 9, 2025.
    • URLs: 308 URLs have been captured 
    • Summary: 143 web page captures; 247 image captures
  • CogDog Showtime
    • By date: Saved 58 times between March 21, 2017 and February 19, 2026.
    • URLs: 1612 URLs have been captured 
    • Summaryhttps://web.archive.org/details/https://show.cogdog.casa: 701 web page captures; 763 image captures

barkingdog.me (2010)

• What/Why: In some fit of WordPress development and an idea that I should have a site just for my favorite photographs, I coined the name Barking Dog Studios as if it was some entity. Really it was an accidental discovery I found that when uploading photos to the WordPress media library, if it was full of EXIF photo metadata, all of that was preserved. So I hacked a theme where to make a post I just had to upload the image to the post- my custom code would pull its title, description, all the camera meta data to “write” the full post. See New WP Theme / Under the Hood Features for Barking Dog Studios – I thought it was very damn clever.
• The Name: Well just continuing the dog theme, why not a photo studio with a dog that barks?
• The Site: Original WordPress (see post on the first version) site, but I saw no major need for adding new content, so I used Site Sucker to make it all static HTML
• Buried Down Deep: Lots of ways to organize photo by tags, like all my favorite ones of cacti, ones with bokeh. But there was all the camera metadata, so you can find all photos taken with my Digital Rebel T1i, ones taken at focal length f/2.8, ones taken at ISO 1000.
• Internet Archive:
  • By date: Saved 354 times between November 14, 2010 and March 11, 2026.
  • URLs: 5,723  URLs have been captured 
  • Summary: 11,598 web page captures; 3,861 image captures

pechaflicker.net (2014)

• What/Why: Maybe the best thing I cobbled together using the Flickr API (which works in 2026 as it did when I built this) as a fun way to let people practice improv with random photos from flickr or “a mashup of pechakucha and powerpoint karaoke” This was often a hit in audience participation when I did invited talks or workshops, and I still think its fun. I can trace it from a series of tagged blog posts of its development that first appeared way back in 2011. I started on my own subdomain, but later felt like it deserved its own domain in 2014 and had been redirecting it to the new domain. As its a collection of PHP files and media, I simply turned off the old redirection and flipped it back. Come home to where you started pechaflickr.
• The Name: My own portmantuing of pechakucha + flickr
• The Site: It’s PHP, and makes use of Dan Coulter’s phpflickr library for talking to the API and the nifty Vegas javascript by Jay Salvat to make the full screen slideshow.
• Buried Down Deep:
  • A teacher who emailed me named Heather got a mode of pechaflickr named for her idea
  • A feature to create improv by tag for photos from the flickr commons.
  • The most hidden and fun part is the result of a bet I made with Roland Tanglao in 2018, he bet the flickr API would die and he is still wrong 8+ years later.
• Internet Archive:
  • By date: 234 times between April 27, 2014 and March 5, 2026.
  • URLs: 139 URLs have been captured 
  • Summary: 333 web page captures; 51 image captures (no surpise this is low, all the media comes from flickr)

To Be Swept Soon

I’ve got a few more domains that expire later in the year that I will likely let go – cogdog.info was mostly a portfolio for me and my web work (and also used for email, but that service is gone from Reclaim Hosting). I am thinking of redoing that site as WordPress.

And I can also zap a really old one I made specifically for a 2010 presentation The Secret Revolution https://secretrevolution.us/

I have turned off auto renew for arganee.world and a huge WordPress multisite there from Networked Narratives days. I am still pondering how to make it all static HTML, I see no compelling reason for it to be WordPress as its mostly my own nostalgia for some major work I did.

Likewise I am ready to bring under the existing domains The UDG Agora project and Mural UDG again these are WordPress Multisites for projects that once were supported by the Justice Institute for British Columbia who did not want to keep old project sites alive. Luckily they were willing to transfer to me, so I have been shouldering domain renewals and separate web hosting for quite stretch, just to keep the URLs alive.

If all cleanup goes as I see, I might down from like 11 to 2 domains by end of the year.

Sweeeeeeeep!

Featured Image: 2014/365/42 Dust My Broom flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license

And I do not make a bloody cent of profit. I am aiming to show I have zero business savvy, not a shred of an instinct to make a buck.

These are made purely for me, but since a vast number of people (okay like three) asked. I set my shop up on threadless.com. It is set up so any profits on an order are donated to charity. Each has a small story.

Get Federated

This first T made was printed at a local shop in Moose Jaw, to where for my Gasta Talk at OER24 in Cork. Ireland. Had to wear it for the talk.

Looks like I already posted a launch of the shop. Profits go to World Central Kitchen and Rain Forest Trust.

Do Not Get Your Own Get Federated T!

Cog.Dog Official

The second T put to use the design made custom for me by Bryan Mathers. I don’t have one but Terry Greene seems to wear one a lot. The logo is a bit oversized, I am an amateur designer

The vast profits go to World Wildlife Fund  and  Doctors Without Borders.

Nobody wants a Cog.Dog Official T

For Those About to Write Tags (we salute you)

I can’t remember where I needed it, but sometime in the mid 2010s I went looking for an image to represent HTML, and fell in love with one on a t-shirt from a company named The Refinery. I stretched the rules of image reuse to feel like if I bought a shirt it was okay to re-use the logo. The shits is so worn out I decided to recreate it- pretty easy to do once I found The Squealer font.

Any sales profits goes to Defenders of Wildlife.

Rock your HTML with the shirt!

Poststructural Club

C’mon, are there rules? I remixed the Fight Club poster into pne for Poststructural Club when my wife Cori was preparing a seminar talk on Poststructuralism. For the title part, I found a Fight This font that captured the spirit of the film and made it easy to slap into a short design.

Sales margins goes to the International Association for Suicide Prevention.

Want to be in the club? The first rule of Post Structural T-Shirt club is click away.

What the Foucault?

In one of our conversations over her readings of Foucault, I made a WTF joke for Cori. She laughed. So with a little bit of text editing Photoshop, it’s another shirt on the block.

All proceeds benefit the American Association of People with Disabilities.

Want to where some WTF(oucault) style? Order it now.

Let’s Share What We Know: World Wide Web 1993

This one is by Mastodon accident. I read references that the original motto of the World Wide Web project at CERN was “Let’s Share What We Know.” My initial web searches only mentioned it without source. After asking abut it lazwweb style @ricmac shared a link with the source image, a very low quality GIF. He replied with a wish for a t-shirt, so…. I redid the text as close as I could to the original and cleaned some scraggly edges on the Ws.

Proceeds go to the Voices of the Children that supports Ukrainian children suffering under war conditions.

Show you Share What you Know on the Three Ws 1993 Style

ai;dr

I can take no credit. It all goes to Eric Likness @carpetbomberz who posted it. There is some more credit found in an article from Futurism. I merely took the letters and plopped it in Photoshop, I cant claim a thing except wearing it now.

The thousands of sales (hah) will benefit the It Gets Better project (and we hope “it” does).

Say ai;dr on your own body.

I have heard comment that Threadless doees not ship to all countries, sorry, they do not cover the globe. But I am also not really doing a business here, so if a design really captures your eye (I am as the Brits say, gobsmacked). I will share all the designs here as PNGs.

Do with them what you want, including ignoring. Download the files for

• Get Federated (PNG)
• HTML ACDC style (PNG)
• Poststructural Club (PNG)
• Let’s Share What we Know (WWW 1993) (PNG)
• What the Foucault (PNG)
• ai;dr (PNG)

That’s my t-shirt empire, it’s vast

And this month there was almost no need for fixing holes for ones not added or tagged correctly (okay one was taken, posted, but missed the album cut).

There are of course the requisite dog and prairie and weathered wood photos, snow covered sunflowers but let’s see how the All Mighty ChadGPT can do to summarize rtge weired red hole and the anti Cog Dog Blog sign.

Here ya go Chad

Now it’s time to look at 28 photos from February. This screenshot of photos represents one month of photos taken each day in February. Write a one paragraph summary that captures themes, common topics, and also anything that stands out from the rest.

Holy frijole, the dude is getting less pedantic. Its still nothing I would ever write nor would pass off as my own. But not bad, you pile of bones.

March reads like a system reboot that doesn’t quite finish. Snow lingers in patches while mud takes over the rest, a half-installed season flickering between states. The usual cast returns, boards with peeling paint, barbed wire, seed heads, rusted hardware, but now they’re less frozen artifacts and more evidence of thaw, things loosening their grip. Water shows up in motion, pumped, pooled, smeared across glass, while the sky keeps trying on drama with streaked sunsets and pale suns behind cloud filters. Dogs are everywhere, resting, watching, riding along, anchoring the whole sequence in something steady while everything else shifts. There’s a quiet humor threaded through it too: the blunt “no” symbols on a door, a pair of playing cards like a shrug from the universe, a lineup of dog toys posed as if for inspection. And then small signals of change: bare ground underfoot, a hand reaching into dry grass, a deck ready for sitting even if no one quite believes it yet. March isn’t pretty here, it’s procedural, a month of toggles and in-betweens, where winter hasn’t left but spring has started editing the file.

ChatGPT whips out the poetic review of my March photos s

So long procedural March and hello April and maybe the usual cast shall return.

Featured Image: Shaken, Not Stirred flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license

Anyone?

I for one was in that Robson Square conference room in Vancouver at the 2009 OpenEd Conference, for Gardner Campbell’s talk on No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences. I can actually pick out of the recording my own cheers and laughter from the audience in this opening moment of Gardner’s talk.

It was the most exuberant, optimistic of web times, and likely looks naive in bitter hindsight. But I’d rather have lived that than not.

Gardner’s slide had a quote from Clay Shirky’s book (it’s stilll on my shelf) Here Comes Everybody about “living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race”. With his ever poetic oration, Gardner stated:

It’s as of day after day I say “I have a bag of gold would you like a bag of gold?”

And people say “Where do find time for bags of gold?” “Oh no, another currency to master!” “Gold? Is that sustainable?”

No, you spend it. “Well what would you spend it on?” What would you like to spend it on? “I don’t have time for your philosophical questions, Gardner!”

It’s a bag of gold. What part of that do you not understand?

Gardner Campbell, OpenEd 2009 No Digital Facelifts

As it did so often, Bags of Gold took off and morphed through the cult of DS106 as remix, to animated text versions, to cover songs, to even more weirder remixes. It was part of the typical ds106 course for the part about personal cyber infrastructure.

The Bag No More

Alas the old stories. Yawn, eh? There is no bag of gold anymore, it’s something, well more fecal, right?

I note that Chris Lott mused in 2022 well before me What Happened to the Bags of Gold?

But here I am, looking around at veritable mountains of gold that not only remain undisturbed, but for many seem to have disappeared beyond the broad horizons bounding a flatland of ephemerality characterized by relentless consumerism, individual rootlessness, and a weird kind of collective amnesia… all yoked firmly to what Langdon Winner called “technological somnambulism.”

https://staff.washington.edu/clott/2022/what-happened-to-the-bags-of-gold/

So gold is not gone, but it is again, us? as in Pogo from 1970.

Yet I find specks and glints and hints of internet gold almost daily. It’s out there, often in my mind the corners yo will hear called the #SmallWeb. The gold is way way way out on the x axis of the long tail, maybe even farther out than ever before.

And yes, some like Stephen Downes and Doug Belshaw are trying to tune their RSS feed consumption to increase the flow. People desire the machinery to allegdly address a signal noise issue.

Indeed I get some of my gold specks in feeds and socials. But the most interesting ones are not handed to me on some conveyer belt, they are ones that I end up as the old site goes Stumbling Upon, and often it is 3, 4, 12 links beyond the first one I looked at.

That’s the magic. That’s what it makes most delightful, when you click a link, see something, and momentarily stop breathing. You might even utter a Neoi like “woah”.

It’s the finding it yourself, not having it handed to you, that makes for me, the true gold. The other stuff is often pyrite or maybe just some gold paint.

Let me stop blabbing and give some examples. At least as best I can recollect them.

From Profile to Open Source Pinball Map

Yeah people will pile up their “important links” on some tree, mostly links to their socials. Selfie links. But i have found consistently, that people have a different place to put links to their projects, hobbies, passions, in different places.

I find these often in people’s email footers. I have a little habit of actually scanning what people put into their footers. Sure, its usually the professional links to publications or cvs, but often, I will find what I call a passion link.

The same thing happens on some people’s social media profiles. Many of the big mall sites give you maybe one link, one of many reasons I love Mastodon, is you get four slots.

So sometimes, if I am seeing stuff in a stream maybe from a person I do not know, e.g. reposted by someone I do, I get idly curious about them. A profile is a bit of a calling card.

I cannot even remember the account or name of one I looked at recently. The icon I think was a man in banana suit? He had links to his web site, and maybe code repos, but I saw this one, and got curious.

https://www.theflip.museum

The Flip is a not yet built “playable museum” of pinball that some people are organizing in Chicago. Now I have just some childhood memories of playing pinball, but I know a few friends that are rather gonzo about it. Heck one even made it his business.

But then I scroll down the page, because the gold is found by scanning for sideways link destinations- I am in Pinball Map, a kind of user contributed global map of where specific pinball machines are found.

Or as it says on its GitHub repo “Founded in 2008, Pinball Map is an open source, crowdsourced worldwide map of public pinball machines.”

So I do not see any machines mapped in Moose Jaw, but quite a few in nearby Regina.

Now I know hardly enough to search for specific machines, but when I see this kind of dedication and focus to map something that is pretty specialized AND it is open source, this is shiny web gold.

I would have never even known this existed had I not gone curiosity wandering.

I Was Not Even Looking for a Golden Essay on Community Making

Well actually I was last month when I organized an Open Education Week session OEWeek Live! Open Conversation on Online Communities. Wish I had this gold fleck.

It’s like Tom Woodward’s comment to my post about RSS Readers, Currents, Streams, and Puddles, where as opposed to some folks who see unread posts as a problem:

I always saw lots of unread items as a good thing.

They weren’t 100s of obligations but 100s of opportunities for something awesome. I was always sad when I got through everything.

Tom Woodward

I have a folder in my Feed reader from a handful of sites I call them together “Neat Stuff”. Right now, I have 225 unread items, and like Tom, zero anguish. But recently in a moment of just needing some scan time… okay tis happens a lot in the middle of the night. Sometimes the dogs wake me up, sometimes its my diabetes with low or high blood sugar. But I am sitting downstairs at like 3:30am waiting, so I flip open my unread folders and scan, and something jumps out.

I won’t even draw a red box around it, but its one of the “unread” ones because I clicked on a title

It’s from Cool Tools and the title is “Flighty / 23 learnings on community / Keep the Meter Running” — had I not been thinkling this month about community, O might have gone on by. But oh am I glad the gold speck flickered.

First of all I remembered that Cool Tools is a long long long running series of mentions of… net stuff on Kevin Kelly’s web site. It’s been around since like 1892 (Kidding). Even looking at the main site, I see today (March 31) a book cover I recognize. I have I think 2 copies of Tacopedia.

But I am distracted. The link I followed started with a review of a Flight app I was not looking for, but the second link… well I just have to quote what I read.

I am so grateful when someone who is truly adept in their field shares their learnings, and Patricia Mou’s essay is a decade’s worth of wisdom in community building and holding space. My own personal journey with community has been about repairing what went wrong in the church structures I grew up in, so I feel very lucky now to be a facilitator and spaceholder within a few small webs of community, both online and in person. This essay reaffirms that, when it’s done well, community can be both life-changing and world-changing. The learnings that resonate most for me are: You will become everyone’s mother and father whether you want to or not. / You cannot ask for transcendence from a nervous system that hasn’t yet landed. / Light structure is what makes deep emergence possible. / What your community doesn’t talk about shapes it as much as what it does. — CD

https://kk.org/cooltools/flighty-23-learnings-on-community-keep-the-meter-running/

This is the best kind of web summary. It’s not some GenAI bubbly goo, it’s got a real human’s perspective and connection, why they wrote it up (no idea who CD is I guess Kelly has writers). This is te style I have always respected about Stephen I am Retiring in A Week Downes, that he always has an opinion. I do not have to agree, but I can see why he thought the site is worth listing.

Anyhow, this post on 23 learnings on building community and holding space is actually more than a fleck or speck of gold, its a real solid nugget. I was further snagged by a good tagline “re-composting learnings from failure, utopia, and everything in between.”

And yes, like the pinball map, I have not gone deep yet, but this list, which feels like its born from a real practice and experience, is fresh and intriguing. Right there, item 1 “You are not creating a community or holding a container from nothing: you are becoming a vessel for something that already wants to exist.” I want to sit longer with this (longer than I did at 3:30am).

How would I have ever even come across it where I not scanning a long list of “neat stuff” link titles? What did this one pop out?

Whether I know or not matters little. The best gold comes when you are not even prospecting for it.

Go to the Top of the Domain, Riley

Links are most typically delete. You click, you scan, maybe you bookmark, maybe you share. Are you done?

I am not. One of the venerable lessons from Mike Caulfields 4 Moves (I forget which letter it is) is to explore the site that contains the link. Who is behind it? What else do they have? What do they link to? If you found one thing “neat” 4 directories deep, there’s likely more.

So I often peel the URLs back to see who’s house it is on.

Somewhere (forget, was it Mastodon?) I was a link to this nifty use of Wikipedia data, call it In Every Language. It displays on load a randomly chosen Wikipedia topic, and below, it shows the topics representative image from as many different language wikipedia sites it can find (did you know there were like 300 language versions). I find it an interesting study in how visual representations occur.

Like the topic Library, which shows up in 146 languages, and has many different photos representing libraries.

Neat, eh?

I made it one of the weekly discussion starters I put into our OEG Connect Community (so far I have zero non Alan responses, see why I need the 23 learnings on building community and holding space??). I also slipped it into a future DS106 Daily Create.

So I am looking at the URL https://walzr.com/in-every-language/ and my curiosity is… what or who is walzr.com? Hmmm there must my some way to find out.

Well walzr is… Riley Walzr, and what a neat little collection of small web style sites he made, a lot of them leveraging open APIs. There’s one to watch random YouTube videos that got uploaded with no name. Riley did that mock version of gmail that makes it just like you are reading Epstein’s inbox (that got some virality, right?). Lunches.fyi gives the menus from tech company cafeterias. Papers from Today shows the cover images of major newspapers and lets you look back at past dates.

There is all kinds of gold hanging put here, that you would never know from just following one link handed to you.

Gone Gold Panning

As long as I find these specks I am not so worried about the so called web end game. And yes, as a former Geology student, I do have actual gold panning experience (once to Bumble Bee Creek in Arizona).

Similar technique, slow, steady, sift.

Gold is in the creek.

Featured Image: Single frame of Gardner Campbell in No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable about Open Educational Experiences from YouTube. Superimposed on top is public domain photo from the Library of Congress Gold prospector examining a pan to see how much gold it contains. Pinos Altos, New Mexico.

The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.

Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system.

….

I don’t say this lightly: it looks to me like 2026 is the year that decides whether the open web as we know it will survive at all, and we have to fight like the threat is existential. Because it is.

https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/

Serious, right? Still I might have not read all the way through. When a good friend shared it by email with a note of it’s “stirring call to action” I re-read this end part again.

Huh? The action called for is to support the organizations making a stand (not that I disagree) and hold on to hopes of some kind of “Good AI“?

I feel less than stirred.

It was coming across Anil Dash’s novel style of web site in the early 2000s, you know the “blog thing” that I learned of Six Apart, and this made my own blog’s first home on Movable Type. And I sure was a big fan of Glitch (it’s game ended 2025). I had more connected memories and went into the text box of my favorite tool to type in my query… not some bot thing but my own blog.

Bear with the tangents that happened.

First I was in a run down of a crazy zany bit of travel stretch I did in 2013.

The hit on the search was in reference to one great stop in there was attending the Moxfest 2013 conference in London, noting “Keynoter I Most Wished To Meet But Did Not: Anil Dash at Mozfest.” I see him listed in the event web site (wow still alive), mentioned in a few blogs, but not sure what the talk was about. I’d guess it was on the heels of Anil’s 2012 post about the Web We Lost, so it was 14 years from that to end game.

Ahh, but wait a minute, I was there near the front of the room to get this photo (and for which, this 13 year old posted image registers a like from the subject)

But then I got myself distracted in the middle of my post scanning the talks, presentations, pocasts, etc I did in those 40 days. Sure its my vanity, but this is my own web page, and I was curious about the links that persevered.

The video from University of Alaska Fairbanks for the talk I gave. Gone. a Digital Beards podcast I did there. Gone. A video I recorded with Martin Weller posted on the OER Research Hub. Gone. An etherpad for some session I initiated at Mozfest. Gone. An Edutalk podcast recorded in John Johston’s kitchen. Gone.

Now here is what I found interesting. Of all the recordings of stuff I did, the most reliable source of this 13 year old content was the ones posted on YouTube. I ended up taking a bit of my day replacing dead links with ones from the Internet Archive, and found a few more where the media left alive… was on YouTube.

Now look, I am in no way denying that Google ins front and center with all the blame to heap on the web’s end game, yet here I am looking at maybe the most reliable archive of media. It’s so easy to get up and proclaim Googles evilness and urge everyone to jump off the ship, but when I see how much of the web has been abandoned by the organizations and individuals that originally made them, I am not quite confident of heaping all the web end game blame on the broligarchy.

I defend them not, but I feel individuals have responsibility here. It’s way I spend my own time here in the blog fixing old links, and scouring for lost media.

I am a reclaimer and a maintainer of my own stuff. The job never ends, but I won’t quit.

Hang on, I am not done yet talking about Anil Dash. He personally stepped up in 2011 when I was faced with a hosting problem for this monster I created called Feed2JS, a web thing I cobbled from other’s ideas to do what now seems arcane- being able to include in a web site a dynamic widget.sidebar powered by RSS and added as cut and paste Javascript.

Some kind folks had run it for me for quite some time, but their company got bought, and my freeloading traffic eating abrge of a site had to find a new home. I put out a call for help on this blog, and added it to the output itself.

I do remember that Anil directly contacted me by email and did financially contribute to help with the server costs. I went deep into my gmail and narrowed the search for just that year, but did not find his message.

The thing is I found tons of message from others, many who donated small and medium amounts of $, quite a few messages came via a link I had for a while on About.me. In combing through messages friom that era, I was rather overwhelmed at how interpersonal and generous email was then. There was not just the people who ponied some money but many more that expressed their gratitude.

Then it struck me again. I was there in the vile Google platform, able to do pinpoint searches on 13 year old messages.

One more time, I am not aiming to make a defense of all that Google does, but am finding this weird irony of getting this long running bit of my digital past. And I have not even cracked open the Google Drive,

The End End Game

I really want to relish Anil’s last message to his Web End Game post:

Ultimately I think, if given the choice, people will pick home-cooked, locally-grown, heart-felt digital meals over factory-farmed fast food technology every time.

https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/

I do not find this true at all. We have been given choice, and predominantly over the last X years, most people have opted for the fast food of social media.

We are not just passive victims here, most of us gave in, caved in to the convenience of the Big Sites, It deserves a look in the mirror, Pogo. It’s more than one set of initials on the knife./

Featured Image: 2009/365/127: The Earth Takes the Dead flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) edited by me to add a bit of the title text of Anil Dash’s Post, the dates 1989-2026 for the age of the web, and Open ClipArt image of a hunting knife by j4p4n.

jimgroom

@jimgroom@social.ds106.us

Sometimes it’s just right in front of you. #ds106

March 26, 2026, 5:21 pm 0 boosts 5 favorites

If you are confused, well, better just stay that way. But Jim shows the ds106 call sign but noting where it lives in the world.

Since 2011 I have been tuning my senses to finding the numbers 106 out in the world… 411 times says my flickr tag. Just a quick scan:

It was December 2010 this affliction started, in the incubation time of the first open version of the course Jim had taught (openly) earlier in the year at University of Mary Washington as a course named DS106 (see my take Spiraling Down Minuscule DS106 History Details). Ideas were hatched in a Skype call, Jim ran off to Italy for a vacation, Martha Burtis was building the first DS106 Assignment Bank. I am pretty sure Tom Woodward tossed out the first call to Say it Like Peanut Butter.

And for some stupid reason, I was running. Literally. I was in training for the Phoenix Rock and Roll Marathon. On December 18 I was running on a canal path in Mesa Arizona and noticed a number on trail post. I stopped. It was THE number. This is my first 106 photo, insanely edited to make it psychedelic.

And thus it became my thing to always have 106 in my mind out in the world, like a back ground whisper, and to seek all the places I could see it. Road signs. License plates. Numbers on a scale. Store labels. On clocks. Room numbers. And then go farther or weirder, arrange it out of snow or dog bones, or juniper berries. Nabbing it on an odometer. Wrangle it out of a car with two number 53s on it. Stretch it as seeing 10-6. Finding it backwards. Or clockwise. Or done wrong. Or through math.

It’s endless.

And it too made it into the assignment bank as CogDog’s Illustrate 106.

Yeah, it’s a weird obsession, but I find it’s also a fantastic incentive to spend some time noticing details in the world. Heck I already wrote this blog post before (and yes, there is some numerical discrepancies in the count, sue me)

And I am not alone!   In her own episode of the Teaching in Higher Education podcastm Bonni Stachowiak talsk about her fascination with the number 208… in episode 208. I still regret the day I narrowly missed catching a 208208 on the odometer of Red Dog the truck.

I have no real rationale way to explain it, but it means much to me, that I wont’s stop. The first 106 spotted in December 2010 is booked at the most recent one form January 17, 2026, a hotel room sign in Regina, the night Cori and I got stranded there in an ice storm.

With some help, that is a span of 5509 days or 132,216 hours or 475,977,600 seconds.

I bet I could find a 106 in there

Thanks Jim, for the nudge to think about my 106 mania.

Featured Image: Room #ds106 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license.

If you are unaware of the Small Web, maybe just stay that way. You can look it up and have some GenAI powerd tool with a dude’s name summarize what it is. But for me, it is the still audible faintly rippling echo of the original dream of the web, barely discernable to most subsumed to enpoopified platformatization or cocooned in Zuzkerburgerspaces.

For me, the existence is the pulse in the Fediverse under the #SmallWeb hashtag Note that hashtags are not quite evenly distributed, and are best served from your own instances url appended by /tags/smallweb — maybe one day it will flow from @smallweb.

Following that tag and maybe Kagi’s own small web stream serves me stuff often worth digging into, web things built of the basic elements of the web istself, sitting on the fringe, ones built by individual people, shared for the sake of just sharing.

The web that exists and works quite fine as an undercurrent, and one that we can avoid netstalgic warbling.

Here I share two what I am calling web side cars, almost miniscule files of html, javascript, maybe json that I have hung on the side of my website it is own tiny space. You can do this stuff if you are able to actually upload files to your own server, and it might (gasp) involve editing some text data files that weight like a whopping 5k.

They will not get you a job or fix the politics or get you likes… but I just found them interesting, especially as you can actual add them without having to grunt or groan or npm or however the usual server command line mumbo jumbo dance goes.

I am Human and here is my json

I actually do not worry too much that anyone really thinks I am not human, I assert my frequent and often not edited typos, or my grammatical torques make it freaking obvious. I just fixed my Memorial Stadium post noticing in the opening sentence I typed “sorts” rather than “sports”. Amd my Mastodon profile @cogdog makes its own assertion:

I typo [often] therefore I am [human].

Ha ha.

I came across a week or so ago the human.json protocol by Beto Dealmeida “a lightweight protocol for humans to assert authorship of their site content and vouch for the humanity of others. It uses URL ownership as identity, and trust propagates through a crawlable web of vouches between sites.”

You can read the info yourself, right?

Essentially you create a tiny text file in json format (do not run away screaming) that include the URL for your own humanly created site, for me cogdogblog.com and optionally an array of other people’s web sites that you can “vouch” for as being humanly made. Here’s mine I did quickly as a test:

{
  "version": "0.1.1",
  "url": "https://cogdogblog.com",
  "vouches": [
    {
      "url": "https://darcynorman.net/",
      "vouched_at": "2026-03-20"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://dougbelshaw.com/",
      "vouched_at": "2026-03-22"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://dougiamas.com/",
      "vouched_at": "2026-03-22"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://bionicteaching.com/",
      "vouched_at": "2026-03-22"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://downes.ca/",
      "vouched_at": "2026-03-22"
    }
  ]
}

I uploaded to the root of my ReclaimHosting hosted server (plug for Reclaim, the best hosts in the webiverse). Now the more tricky part is you have to get in the <head> part of your web sites template, one line of a meta that points to it’s location.

Since I know a bit about WordPress themes, I edited header.php in the child theme for my site. I probably lost most of you there. It depends on how your site is run. I added this line as mine is at the top of my domain

<link rel="human-json" href="/human.json">

What happens?

Not much.

The fun comes when you install the Chrome or Firefox extension. For any site running its own human.json, the extension lights up green. For mine, it works on any URL under the cogdogblog.com banner.

If I visit a site that has been vouched for by me or anyone else using human.json, like https://darcynorman.net/ it lights up green for being vouched, and shows a chain of “vouchification”

Of course someone will pipe in already, “GenAI can just spoof this.” Of course it can, but that’s not the point to just pee on all the parades like that.

Will it create a vast web of trust? Doubtfully. Will many people bother? likely not. Will it solve all the problems of AI sloppification? Nope. But it’s interesting.

It carries both the act that an individual can do by tossing a single tiny file on their web server but also the pay it forward effect by vouching for other people.

I am human and I have the json blue light special to show it. It’s an action I can take.

Wandering the Small Web

Wander is just a beautiful concept, something that sends warm ripples down the spine when just using it. It’s a randomly served console that delivers a stream of other small web sites. Maybe without even trying to explain it you can read the infoand explore the demo made by its creator.

Or heck, launch mine https://cogdogblog.com/wander/ Each time you click wander, another site loads (some don’t always work, some CORS web thing, just wander on). I just found this wild home page in my console:

If the site grabs your attention, open it. If not keep wandering. If you click the Console buttont, you get the info about the one in view (mine), plus as you can see the most recent wandered site and the indication that it came from someone else’s console.

The neighbors button displays the other consoles mine recommends (which you cna edit). The Pages button lists the sites I have loaded as recommendations. And what’s neat also is it saves a history of your current wander session in case you lost track of something.

Again, maybe this has not Major Use That Will Increase Productivity or Save Time (the result may be the opposite) but it is a delightful way to navigate a constellation of other sites that are recommended by others who host a wander.

And the whole thing is one director with an index.html file for the console display, and single Javascript site you edit to include the pages to show and a list of other consoles to be connected to yours. It’s dead simple to set up, see the instructions.

Just Attached the Side Cars

I really just quickly added these two mini small web “things” to my own domain. I barely scratched the surface. But I find the freshness and human spirit of thise stand alone web tools just a delight. I have lots of room to strap on more side cars.

This is the web I came for. And stick around for.

Featured Image: Indian parcel courier on Royal Enfield motorbike, Sydney, c.1933 flickr photo by State Library of NSW shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) with a little bit of remix by me to change the text on the car. There was all kinds of side car images in the flickr commons and I remain flabbergasted seeing nearly everyone else reaching for those same same same GenAI cartoon extrusions.

I felt that when I read a post by Terry Godier about his novel idea and implementation of Current, an RSS Reader that looks like it breaks the mold of how we read feeds.

Alan is @cogdog ??

@cogdog@cosocial.ca

I’ve all ready tagged this as #CogDogCoolTech so it will be auto posted soon, but easily Current is the most exciting thing I have seen in many clicks. A whole new approach for sifting the web, not your grandpa’s RSS reader.

And I have not even tried it yet. That’s how sure I am.

https://www.terrygodier.com/current

March 22, 2026, 2:38 am 0 boosts 1 favorites

I still have not yet tried Current yet, hey I get distracted. I saw positive replies from Frederic Graver who did try it, as well as a note from Doug Belshaw who was not crazy about it being Mac only. In fact Doug, who seems to build things while he sleeps, ended up creating his own variant he calls Stream.

Maybe one reason I perhaps peaked interest is I am not quite sure I have the same issue Terry described:

I started building Current before I had the words for why.

The impulse was simpler than a philosophy: every RSS reader I tried made me feel bad. Not because the apps were ugly or broken (most were quite good) but because they all seemed to agree on something I didn’t. That reading the internet was a task. That articles were items to be processed. That falling behind was a failure state.

I didn’t have a name for this yet. I just knew I wanted a reader that didn’t make me feel like I owed it something.

https://www.terrygodier.com/current

He names it as a phantom obligation.

It looks like Current has a means to generate a whack sack of feed content from variably rated flows into a more coherent flow for reading, with feeds have user defined “velocities” and variable life times. I get that, its saying not ever post that comes in to your reader has the same weight of importance.

His rationale is just plain sane. And I have no criticism

I have never felt that obligation of need to get to “Feed Read Zero”. I leave my reader chock full of unread stuff that eventually slides away. Once in a while if I feel like being tody, heck I just mark them all read.

Reset.

But maybe my reading habits are different. I subscribe to I don’t even know how many feeds upwards towards 200? But I do not look at all that flow at once. Nor do I go through source by source and read them all.

My reading is more like… different sized puddles, because I organize them into folders that are loosely topic oriented. Look at how many I have unread and I have zero stress.

Most of the folders I rarely glance at, the main one is “top shelf” and those are the friends and colleagues blogs I do want to read much more frequently.

This is a variant I think of a strategy from Alec Couros I followed long ago for that Bird Name Social Media site that was popular 10 years ago. Alec had blogged about (when he used to blog) that he would follow like 10s of thousands of accounts but did not read them, he would focus on a twitter list, of the ones that were most important to him. I still do that in Mastodon, I almost never look at the full flow.

The other folders are ones I just glance at time to time, but often just let them flow by. If I find something important, I typically bookmark in Pinboard, but I have no angst about leaving the unreads pile up, heck it does get to quadruple digits sometime. And eventually they flow down the pipe.

I am not saying I do this any better or smarter that Terry or Doug, and we all have different sources we are tracking. I just do not feel the same obligation, and have some uncertainty whether I need a new flow/current/stream.

At the same time, I have yet to try Current, and it could change my approach completely. Maybe I have some reluctance of tailoring a new reading approach when I find my current one is ok.

There may likely be a future post where I rip this one to shreds for my idiocy. That’s always a string possibility.

I’m looking at my puddles of feeds, maybe a current would be a good thing. Still, it was refreshing to read the clarity to the design decisions Terry made.

To be blog-tinued.

Featured Image: 2017/365/45 A Sunset Fell into a Puddle and Flowed Away Downstream flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

I also am free of having 10s of thousands of followers on my Nonstack and having to feed them regularly with news of my speaking engagements and book tours.

There is ample time to pen my long typo ridden posts of nattering mutters that nobody will read. I can almost nuke Akismet on the blog, as the comments come in at a rate of once every third lunar eclipse.

Even better I do not have to groom my Generative AI expertise to waft at conferences, and there is no need for me to be flogging Claude to vibe code something new to demonstrate my prowess. There’s no pressure to be up to speed on the latest LLM model. If all this stuff is as great as they proclaim, I would think I can jump in anytime as it is so advanced I do not need to bring any experience to the table.

But you know, Irrelevance is not for everyone, it can be daunting to be that unimportant. But for me, it’s quiet, and there is so much room to roam, away from the hubub.

Just wanted to send a postcard from the quiet center of Irrelevance, it keeps moving farther away from the noise.

Adios!

Featured Image: A remix of the photo of my 1973 Ford Maverick parked next to a sign in Death Valley that actually reads “Sea Level”. Some German band found that photo and used it for cover art of their CD. This happened in a time where I was relevant