Eighteen Years of Mindful Webworks

Besides being Green Beer Day, March 17 was also the 18th anniversary of the day I first put a page up on the web.

My goodness, how our little web has grown in 18 years. And so has my website.

I didn't know what to do with a website at first. I started by advertising (semi-seriously) my 25c print mini-comics.

Then I put a "sample" comic up. Then the light bulb went off. Unlike my blurry, xerographed, monochrome print mini-comics, the cartoon on-line was sharp (as much as monitors of the day permitted), and wow! sixteen whole colors! Four times as many as print!

It took me a few days, but that's when I realized Print is Finally Dead. I've been loading comics, opinions (of course), VR worlds, songs, noises, vids, and all kinds of nonsense and drivel onto my website ever since.

I'd published the mini-comics for years under "Little Mindless Publications," but the website became "Mindful Webworks," just to go upscale. I was getting old. At first I didn't have a domain; my site was on that spin-off of CompuServe known as Sprynet. Something like home.sprynet.com/~mindful, IIRC. Sprynet got eaten by MindSpring. MindSpring got eaten by EarthLink. The Sprynet site was good all the way through, until the EarthLink account eventually got dropped. By that time, the site was just pages that forwarded to the domain. But, History lost.

I can't even remember getting the domain name, but apparently I did.

Now, there's about five hundred webworks under several topical albums, some derived from nearly seven hundred random doodles, and just for fun a giant Blog Heap o' Links that I maintained for many years and lately have been trying to revive… Also many Playlists of media found around the web and scads of comments made elsewhere.

A couple of years ago, I moved from "static" to "dynamic" website. I've spent the past several years trying to figure out how that works, and how to make my site take best advantage of it.

Among other things, with a dynamic site, I can finally have comments mostly without spam. I've opened a few pages to comments, and actually received one. (Imagine, 18 years on the web and 1 comment. Why I call it the web's best-kept secret.)

I haven't opened up most pages to comments, though. The site was originally just my portfolio of eclectic nonsense. The webpage is a frame. You don't hang a work of art on the wall, carefully framed and lighted, then leave a Sharpie hanging on a string so folks can write their opinions on the wall all around the art.

Or would you? People like interactivity. Sure, there's trolls, and spam, and h8rs, but look at any well-run online community. Take an "art" site I really like, The Lost Issues — all the comments discuss the guy's work and make suggestions and it's nice. I could name several others.

So, I've wondered about opening up my site more for comments. I watched a lot of SysOps in action, especially back on CompuServe. Had a brief but exciting tour of duty as sub SysOp myself. From BBS to Blogs, it can get weird, but it's a new and interactive age. I might do more comments-opening on pages, but I'd hate to get into that, then find it such a burden, consuming time I could be creating, or, worst of all, dealing with tsunamis of off-topic comments or flamewars that lead to closing out comments altogether.

I've spent the past couple of weeks tinkering with the website behind-the-scenes stuff, adjusting the pulleys and levers that make the website work, trying to give it a bit of housecleaning and facelift for the anniversary, wishing I was creating content instead.

However, you know the saying, "If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans?" I had some things I really wanted to do before this anniversary. Instead, these past few days were spent dealing necessarily with Real Life Drama (however manufactured or unnecessary such usually is).

Good thing hitting my website goals doesn't matter to anyone but me.

A very brief run of online daily comic strip about creating an online comic strip, from 1997: Mind Fuel

An MP3 audio promo for Mindful Webworks from 2002.

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