the-inbetween

Glitch

charming saber quill.

For the years this domain was unusued, it was parked on Glitch under the project name charming-saber-quill. The company had good energy, the site was playful and simple to use, it could easily host a static site and some functions, and a domain could be added with a single configuration.

Then in 2022 fastly bought them.

Anyone who has ever used a small-to-mid sized service knew what that foretold: an incredible journey was coming. That modern start-up parlance for "we're shutting down."

One year later gandhi, a European based company that I had been using for domain registration and email for almost two decades, was bought by Total Web Hosting. The stings started coming slowly. First, the email hosting which they included with the domain would now be a paid add-on. I paid for one initially and transfered my primary email to a dedicated provider¹.

Then, as my domains were nearing renewal, the registration prices went up. A lot. For some, like .email, a lot. Now I had to transfer my domains. I took this on piecemeal as each domain approached its expiry and it went well until I moved this domain. The transfer to a new registrar² was smooth though in the process I accidentally wiped the DNS settings for this domain. Now I logged into my Glitch site and to my dismay discovered that the simple CNAME domain config was gone in favour of something that required a fastly account.

I created a fastly account and followed the vague third-party instructions. You have to first create an origin for a CDN^† pointing to your glitch site, then copy the fastly dns settings, and then create a service that creates a certificate so you have https, configure the certificate and origin correctly, and... nothing ever worked.

It wanted a www, bare domains would throw errors, I'd change configs and certificates, I'd set up redirects, and nothing would function how I wanted it to. It was a long way from the simple CDN-less config on glich.com. I was frustrated by this new integration.

Minutes later I went into my netlify account³, created a new project, configured my DNS, and this site was up.

Within the very same week glitch annouced that Important Changes are Coming to Glitch: user accounts and project hosting is ending in July.

It's great to be in control of your own content, to a pixel-pushing degree, and have it be portable, but man, the headaches that keeping that control can cause. If you love spinning around in circles as each little service you use gets shut down or turns to shit, this is the hobby for you.

This is honestly the best and most operationally secure way to do it: keep your domain, email, and web stuff isolated from each other. The downside is the extra administration and, after having free mailboxes for years, usually cost.
The new registrar I use seems OK, however it's USA-based which seems like a liability these days.
I was using it for the sometimes.email landing page already.

1999–

The end of December, 1999. Y2K was looming over us. Galaxy Quest premiered to a disappointing 6th place in the weekly box office, ahead of Bicentennial Man. “Smooth” by Santana featuring Rob Thomas was dominating the Billboard charts, and the local alternative rock station, 102.1 The Edge, concluded their top 1002 of all-time with the very predictable number one: Nirvana's “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” This was my last year as a teenager. This is when I started blogging^†.

I had hoped to return to it last December on what would have been the 25th anniversary. It never happened. My father died, we got brutally sick, we got sick again, we hosted a massive kid's birthday bash, got sick again, and *gesticulates wildly* everything else that's going on. It's that everything else that creates a paralysis.

In the time that this has been sitting as a draft we’ve had two Prime Ministers, a new Pope, a trade war, a vast escalation of actual wars, and an unending deluge of war crimes. Isn’t writing a weblog meaningless in all this? In the time that I’ve been doubting myself and losing focus, fascism and AI—forever linked arm in arm in their dehumanization—have been forging ahead financed by never ending capital. What’s the point?

I’ve since come around to see this paralysis as self-defeating. No, I’m not out to influence minds or change the world. I am writing, and coding^†, to recentre my world: to reconnect with the internet of people, to formalize nebulous thoughts, to practice, to archive, and to remember.

The ideals of the “personal web” still matter to me damnit, especially when the promise of the Internet as a whole has been destroyed by the most extractive aspects of capitalism. That small, human-centered web existed before mass Internet adoption^† that small, human-centered web can still exist in the era of vast, corporate centralization.

On NOEMA last year they wrote “We Need To Rewild The Internet”. The pessimist in me says that it’s too late. The internet, like a city of billions, can not be returned to nature: it’s too vast and developed to allow for that. However, just as in a large city, you can remove the turf grass, pull out the invasive weeds, and create your own little green space. Cultivate local plants, rewild your personal habitat and make it safe for wintering butterflies, migrant birds, and all other forms of local fauna. Create your own oasis in the concrete jungle. A small gesture on its own, yet a network of small gestures accumulates.

A lot of it is an unlearning of habits formed over the last 17 years (the time I’ve had a Twitter account^†.) No templates, no content management solutions, no walled gardens, instead: a craft. A hand made website powered by human readable text in static files—the most portable and universal format—and personal idiosyncasies. Just days ago Taylor Troesh wrote "My website is ugly because I made it". And it is! Designed in a text editor, no creative director in sight, in a throwback style that reflects me. In 16px Georgia, for fuck's sake.

This also means none of the fancy features like comments, or linkbacks, or analytics, or A/B testing different padding on buttons to see which ones get clicked on more often. Yet, it's also without AI slop, nor algorithmic recommendations, nor dark patterns, nor tracking pixels, nor paywalls, and no screen blocking popups asking you to subscribe^†. The easy internet brought all that and more, and at a cost that we're still coming to terms with today.

It’s been a long road from 1999 to 2025. We lost our way. Yet, like bubbly fonts and glossy neon coloured transparent plastics, everything comes back around and a generational gap might be enough to bring back some of those nostalgic hanger-ons. Y2K is in vogue again. Galaxy Quest is a cult classic. 2025 is the year of the blog. Scream into the void. Make a web ring. Make it human, again.