It really was a great thing. It happened naturally too. Started as just a site I posted my writing to, a personal site in 1997, and friends wanted to add their stuff. By 1999 it was renamed from Routhy’s Den to the Den of Amateur Poetry, and then the domain was purchased and the site renamed to The Den of Amateur Writing.
I still remember the pre-PHP days. People would email their works to me and I would manually build an HTML page and update the site within 24 hours.
Yep, I fought against it for years but eventually my new user intake was lower than the rate at which the typical user would fizzle out and move on. We had users that were there for 20 years and regulars, but without fresh ideas and posts things would get stale. So I had to yield and start adhering. Around 2018-2019 things really took a dive in traffic and I could not afford ads as it was all completely out of pocket, so I started a new codebase and rewrote it over 4 years in my spare time. The site before it shut down had a top grade from all of Googles site scanners and I had thought “Perfect… now folks will trickle in again at the right rate.”. And then the delisting.
This is why I shut The Den of Amateur Writing down after 25 years of running and developing it. I had written the entire codebase for Googles SEO, rolled out the update so my users would see a bit more traffic trickle in, and then watched them delist all my URLs 3 months later when this change rolled out. I just gave up. It was taking way too much of my life fighting googles bullshit to provide a free community.
Because I dont need to pay rent for my files and I don’t have to worry about AI and VCs trying invade my privacy.
Yeah, Im excited about the cards but getting a 1GB switch with a 10g uplink was expensive… 10g switches are… a lot.
Extra torpedoes fired!
Trial at Bernies? OK WERE DOING TRIAL AT BERNIES! This is going to be legend-wait for it…
The beauty is that you can shove Pi in it of course.
Banana Cow
I just hoarded this gif
Thats because for some ungodly reason they use Apple Maps. Not sure why they dont integrat with an OpenStreetMaps like service. At least that way users can start contributing to fill the gaps
Whoooooo melds with Vulcan that’s under the sea?!
ITS HUMPBACK WHALE PANTS!!
Squid or Cthulu Snail?
You forgot Tubgirl
Assume spherical poo in a vaccuum.
Man I miss Webrings.