About

About paxtonland

paxtonland.com is an old and often neglected weblog and catch-all sandbox for whatever web application development stuff I’m working on at the time.

History

paxtonland started in 1994 as a links page, I moved it from a gopher site to a website as soon as we setup the web server at the University of Michigan Computing Club (Arbor Information Society). Of course, I started it just to learn HTML but, I was enthralled with the web. It stayed there until 1998 when it got its own domain name (paxtonland.com). I hosted several very early internet projects there such as; Perl experiments, an extensive list of bookmarks, a DIY computer system builders guide, a voting guide for local and national elections, a couple of “zines,” and much more.

In 1998, I moved to this domain and moved the files, etc. It still functioned as a landing page for my browser and had several visitors as well. Since 1996, I was writing monthly “posts” in chronological order. The systems guide had really taken off at this point, but I’d stopped all the other projects I’d taken a lot of inspiration from Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com and still do. However, the more that I learned about the web, the more I was struggling with the transition from a systems engineering driven web to a design and content driven web. I went on to add a software guide where I provided monthly posts about freeware and open sourced software and my experience with using them.

in 1998-99, I was an avid project cool reader, a site-of-the-day list. I hung on the words of Glenn Davis, I couldn’t wait to see what was posted for that day. There, I’d learned about a concept called a weblog and I realized that I was already kind of doing that. Though, really it was more of a once monthly (zine style) link list, than a blog and I certainly didn’t call it a blog, nor did I know what one was. Project Cool closed and metafilter became my window into the daily cool – of what is cool that day.

So, after look around at other people’s work, I decided why not? I read The Misanthropic Bitch, Metafilter, The Scripting News, and so many more…. I was inspired. Pyra Labs had started up in San Francisco to develop web-based project management software. Out of that, blogger was born and I used it from the beginning of it’s origins. At that time, blogger provided an editing interface and published individual posts via FTP to a remote server and it was awesome. It really was the first form of push-button web publishing that was functional and cool. I was a proud blogger user. From that platform, I was able to exponentially expand monthly posts into multiple posts per day. By December 1999, I had 300+ entries.

In 2001, I had well over 3500 entries and but, very few comments, blogger did not support comments and didn’t until 2004 under Google. I moved from blogger to movable type and paxtonland continued but, it was more functional and standards and database driven, I had the files and database back on my servers again. Movable Type achieved the goal of separating content from design. They brought commenting, trackbacks, and much more… until… they started charging. Which I was okay with paying them and helping out Six Apart, which I did but, I was waiting patiently for MySQL support. Back then, they only supported BerkeleyDB and there were so many posts and comments here, that the site was terribly slow. WordPress supported MySQL so, off I went. WordPress was also very smart in offering a migration tool, but the migration script failed (too much data!). I had to do it manually. Anyway, WordPress still powers this site, though I’m thinking about going back to hand coding it.

Content

Once established as a weblog, paxtonland’s content was really all over the map. I focused on technology, politics, and anti-conservatism for the most part. But, I referenced memes, followed the dotcom fall very closely, and reported about local items of interest to Flint. Around 2004, I stopped posting as often as I used to. The site took a lot of time to run at that point. My family and professional life had changed significantly and I had little time to post as often as I used to. I think that this also happened to a lot of the “early adopter” bloggers… we all kind of burned out as our lives changed, just as the rest of the world was blogging. Now the guy who ran the hardware store down the street had a blog… Besides that, paxtonland was really a place for individuals to banter back and forth politically. Which may have amused me and a few others but, not very interesting to the rest of the world.

I started to focus on link posts again, though I’d always had at least a few of those a month, that was all that I did. Today I still do link posts called “News Briefs” named after a news link weekly column that I was doing on another set of web sites. But, then as today, paxtonland was not updated very often.

Around 2006 I pulled down the archives. I started to browse the archives dating back to mid-1999 and noticed that about 50% of the links I’d posted were dead. The older the archive, the higher the percentage of dead links. This was important because some of the links were used to enhance a statement or, there were posts with links in words that didn’t describe the link itself…. context was starting to deteriorate. It occurred to me that blogging and other forms of micro-content was very volatile. Along comes Twitter… just to underscore my point. Now content had a half-life of hours to minutes instead of days to months.

At its absolute peak, paxtonland pulled about 3,000 unique visitors a day. A typical monthly average leveled off to about 7,000 unique visitors a month. Today, we get about 100-150 a week, by contrast. That is a lesson in favor of publishing fresh content.

Perhaps I’ll start posting more often, perhaps I won’t. I’ve thought of bringing back the software and systems guides as they were very helpful to people but, I stopped for a reason. The feedback and questions they generated were very time-consuming to try to answer. If I think of something meaningful to create along those lines, they probably won’t end up here.

Ancient Imagery – Here’s some images you might remember

Misc buttons:

Blogger, of course

Blogvoices was an externally hosted commenting system, hrm… kind of like disqus

This was the button for the Any Browser Campaign to get developers to write cross-standard browsers and get developers to write cross-browser compatible web pages. This issue is far from dead.

Fray day 5

Fray day 6

Independents Day is a grass-roots organization to support and promote independent content developers. It’s still viable after 10 years.

This was among the first Creative Commons buttons. I signed up early and enthusiastically.

Free Culture led that thinking that Creative Commons maintains. Go read the book, for free.

Still going strong

I can barely remember, something to do with AIDS and a day of blogging about AIDS? I can barely remember.

This was the link to the dull forum, where we talked about nothing, infrequently

An early “Powered By Movable Type” button.

Blog shares.. paxtonland is still listed, I think you have to search for it…

Movable Type button that I think was the first

The

Meny

RSS versions, sheesh!

There was some trouble over what version to use, some of us just did them all :) Ironically, 12 years later, the war rages on…

At some point, paxtonland was on cool stop but, I can’t find it now. Additionally, paxtonland was the element “P” on Humbug.com’s Periodic Table of Blogs.

I saw the image below on the cover page of The Nation Magazine, the week after King George II was coronated by the supreme court George Bush II won the election. It became the basis for the political sentiment, satire, and criticism around paxtonland. It was a painting by Brian Stauffer. I got his permission to use the image, though I don’t have the e-mail any longer :)

Worry?

paxtonland consisted of a logo “paxtonland” on the top left side of the page and some sort of image on the top right. There was a fluid black space between. Sort of like this:

Welcome to paxtonland Worry

Here are a few of the many images used. If you clicked on them, they presented a larger version. I changed them constantly but, the Alfred E. Bush image was the most common and longest lasting.

paxtonland top bar