I had started this post weeks ago, but forgotten all about it when this news came in:

GeoCities will close later this year.

It’s soul-crushing news.  A small neighborhood in my heart, named Area 51, just got demolished.  Without further bullshit, here is the award for Web Host of the Decade:

TRIPOD!

Look, there’s not a whole lot I need to say.  They gave us web space when we needed it, we uploaded shit, and they never took it down.  We don’t really need this stuff now, but it’s great to see all these unintential time capsules all over the web.  Below are some sites we started back in the dial-up days and into the Napster era – the Golden Age of Web 1.0 (formerly known as the World Wide Web).

Back before Twitter and Blogger and Facebook and WordPress you had to WRITE HTML and upload that shit over and over until it worked.  These weren’t just free places to store stuff, they were our offices and our workshops.  Tripod and competing sites gave us the tools to craft our own childhoods out of hypertext markup.  I can’t thank them enough, but I can memorialize them (and burn AngelFire in effigy).

Enjoy:

http://members.tripod.com/~Pasty69/uan/index.htm

http://dlbclan.tripod.com/

http://ranjuan.tripod.com/

 

Honorable mention (and a fond farewell): GeoCities

http://www.geocities.com/kage_bunshin_no_jutsu/

 

Post your old hosted sites in the comments so we can all enjoy them!  

So this month I have one of the stars of “The O.C.” and the film “The Last Kiss”, Rachel Bilson. OK, besides that, she hasn’t done a whole lot else. She was in the movie Jumper, but come on, who actually saw that? Good for her that she did though, because that’s where she met soon-to-be hubby Hayden Christiansen (who you might remember as EmokinAnakin Skywalker).

What amuses me most about this month’s babe is a poorly sourced piece on her Wikipedia page, where she said she turned down offers to pose semi-nude for men’s magazines, because ‘her body is sacred’ and is ‘not for the whole world to see’. Apparently talk is cheap, because unless these pictures are some of the best photoshop jobs ever, she was willing to show a bit of flesh for a few extra bucks! (more…)

This post is more of a question that I’m hoping will turn into a lengthy and intelligent conversation. How do you consume information over the web?

RSS feeds have become the bane of my productivity. Having one central location to collect all of the posts from websites that I used to frequent seemed like a great idea, but since I started using Google Reader I have found myself adding more and more feeds to my list and it’s becoming quite overwhelming. Obviously, I’m doing something wrong.

• Problem #1: I’m a slow reader and slightly obsessive

  This has been a problem that I have struggled to overcome for a long time. I can only read as fast as I can speak. Every word that passes before my eyes must be spoken by my internal voice in order to be comprehended. I can speed read in short bursts, but I always fall back into this habit eventually. It’s very frustrating. On top of that, When I am confronted with a page of text I feel compelled to read it all. In the case of Google Reader, reading everything that is presented to me can take a considerable amount of time. If I don’t have that much time available to me then I will read partial articles, star them so I know to go back to them, and then leave them marked as unread. This leads me to…

• Problem #2: I’m lazy

  When I don’t finish a task on the first go, I become less and less motivated to go back to it as time passes. So now I have hundreds (sometimes thousands) of unread or partially read items sitting in my Reader inbox. I want to do something with them, but there is a loud voice in my brain telling me to just get to it later; I have other stuff to do.

• Problem #3: Subscribing to RSS feeds is easy

  If I read one post on a blog that amuses or informs me in the slightest, I go right for the subscribe button. I can’t help myself. I do this under the assumption that I will simply skip over uninteresting posts, but see problem #1. Information comes in much faster than I can keep up with. Sometimes I pull up my subscription list and trim it down, but after a week or so it is usually built back up again.

Have any of my fellow Tiny Gods or assorted Internet residents encountered these same issues? What do you do to keep your incoming information at a manageable level?

Also, please subscribe to the Tiny Gods RSS feed if you haven’t already!

And after a good long time of being content to read and comment, but not feeling necessarily that I had anything especially significant to contribute, I realized that your readers of the opposite sex (or of the same sex… no judgments at Tiny Gods) might be interested in a monthly posting to compliment the BotW series.  And here it is.  The small goddess’ inaugural post and your first installment of “Beefcake of the Month”.  (more…)