After the nuking of Knuckledraggin and more recently
WRSA, I thought I'd at least look into who owns Wurdpress and a little
bit of what they're about.
The
company, Automatic, who owns Wurdpress, among other software firms, has
apparently had a change of corporate policy, while leaving their
mission statement unchanged. To wit:
Note
the second paragraph, in particular the first word of the last line.
I'd guess politics should be stricken from their corporate statement as
well as the other highlighted portions of the text.
What
I’ve been wondering for a long time is why a bunch of the Freedom blog
owners don’t get together with a couple of Freedom loving software guys
and
write your own blogging platform or do as the
“The Woodpile Report” and this guy pushingrubberdownhill . com has done,
I.E. private server owned by the blog
owner with blogging software home grown or nearly so. There are other
people out there that have apparently done the same thing. Then the only
“gate” is the cable to the webosphere.
I confess
that I know little about what I’m talking about here technically, but I
don’t think it can be that difficult. Sure, WurdPress and Blogger make
it easy and inexpensive to set up a visually pleasing, easy to maintain
site, however I think that one or two software guys sympathetic the
cause of Freedom should be able to design something usable in a short
amount of time.
I also assume that, given the personalities displayed in some of the blogs, by some of the blog owners, compromise
over some design or appearance aspects may be difficult, but that’s
life. Start plain and simple and build from there. Make it scalable and backwards
compatible. It’s a lot more difficult to nuke blog owner servers and software than it
is to nuke a site hosted on a platform controlled by some large left
wing multi-national company who disagrees with the blog’s message despite their lip service in their published corporate policy.
As
with other methods of fighting the battle of Freedom and holding
companies accountable, hit'em in the pocketbook. I've got several
hundred bookmarks to Freedom blogs in my browser. All of those sites
have a blog roll so finding a whole lot of Freedom sites shouldn't be
that difficult. I must admit that out of all of those sites there's
maybe a dozen or so I visit on any kind of a regular basis and fewer
still that I comment on. However if there's that many bookmarks in my
browser and a good potion of them, especially the high traffic ones,
started using the same independent blogging platforms, someone would
notice.
I also think that some blog owners use
the advertising revenue from the ads displayed on their sites to help
defray the cost of running the blog. Some few even use it as a
semi-main income stream. However, from what I've been able to find
out, most of the ads on most of the sites are NOT controlled by the
blog owners. I'm illustrating here the ad ons that are contained in
the adds, like click counters, software that hoovers up the site
visitors browser data and other nefarious software. The ads are
controlled by the platform hosting service, which begs the question,
who really owns the site.
Given the No Notice nuking displayed by Wurdpress recently, I don’t know if this is possible, but every blog owner should
have a backup plan, if they don’t have one already, for all of the
articles and other features of their site now hosted by Blogger or
WurdPress. This nuking of Freedom sites is just starting to get get rolling.
Knuckledraggin’, WRSA, who’s next?
Yes, you can easily build a stand alone server using "LAMP", Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Configuring it and keeping it updated is a bit of a geek thing, but not terribly hard to learn.
ReplyDeleteYou still need an IP address, and an Internet provider that will allow you to run a server from home. If your Internet provider won't allow a fixed, "Staic IP", there are ways around that, like Dynamic DNS, which will allow you to have a non-static IP address.
If you're very successful, and draw a lot of traffic, at some point your Internet provider (most likely your home provider, aka "Big Telcom") will start to squawk over your bandwidth usage, and will either tell you knock it off, throttle you back to dial-up speeds, force you to buy a "Commercial" or "Business" level of service, or just cancel you outright.
There are other providers who you can buy bandwidth from, but that assumes they have access to the physical media bring the Internet to you; cable, fiber, wireless, or telco lines, or can run their own media to you.
I did all this when I ran my "Neighborhood Wireless Internet Hot Spot Service". I bought my bandwidth from MegaPath, ran the servers in my apartment, and provided a wireless connection to my customers.
So there are ways to do it. It just takes a certain level of technical competence, a LOT of reading (O'Reilly Books!!), and some cash. Since I was running Linux, I was able to use cast-off or off-lease PC's that I bought cheap or got FREE! My major expense was the Wireless gear, as I bought commercial grade equipment, antennas, cable, and it's an order of magnitude more costly than consumer grade gear.
The devil is in the details. Sounds easy but surely is not. The "distributed" company has been going for quite a few years and has enjoyed several rounds of venture capital (almost enough-if they were really community minded-to pay to clean all the poop off the sidewalks in their hometown).
ReplyDeleteIf we had a functioning government it might have been possible to treat the electronic media industry as a utility and regulate them. Not saying anything good would come of it and am confident the electronic media overlords would be willing to pay $$$ billions to protect their turf. There would be a lot of under-the-table money to buy politicians off so that nothing positive would result. But don't tell Nancy and Perv-joe there is easy money to be had.
No doubt that Nannu and Jerky Joe know all about the money involved in the cable industry. There sure was a lot of money spent for cell phone bandwidth a number of years back, which the FCC took partly from Ham Radio operators. Bandwidth in radio waves was worth billions, yes Billions with a B. I remember that they were having an auction of the small bit of radio spectrum, and the companies were literally salivating, waiting for the chance to grab their piece of the pie.
DeleteI have no doubt that the public servants, haha, had their hats in one hand, and the other one out waiting for it to be filled, just like a bell hop in an old 1950's movie.
One thing that is always true, when these companies say that it is not about money, it's about money.
pigpen51
Interesting that bandwidth auctions are relatively frequent and continue to reap $$$Billions for the feds.
DeleteThis is easy to do (really easy). It wouldn't even cost all of that much for the traffic we're talking about. I'm privately hosted, and if my provider messed with me, I could be back up in less than a week at the same URL with most of my old content and even the same format.
ReplyDeleteTrick one - get a URL that doesn't depend on blogspot or wordpress. Start so your blog is mirrored on both. Then redirect to your new place. If you own your URL - people can always find you.
Trick two - find a hosting place. If there's enough interest (and $ to pay for it) I could easily put that together.
I second that, John. Having been a Network Support Engineer for F5 and Verio, I can also assist in getting you up and running if your hosting exceeds capacity for more than one web server. Find a cheap used 1500 (better: 1600) and I can assist with setup, no worries!
DeleteI recommend a hosting company so you can't be bothered with bandwidth costs - it will be limited to the pipe size going to your server, or F5 box. Hard to "pull the plug" when the hosting company is contractually obligated to keeping the pipe open...