It has been a painful effort to keep my personal homepage alive. I managed to keep it breathing last year only because I was working 30 hours a week for most of the year. This year, however, I got my first permanent job in ten years. It requires about 50 hours a week of my life. Time is a luxury. And so I worry about losing my soul, my hope, my homepage.

After a year and a half of just maintaining my site, I came to these conclusions: maintenance of a homepage does not equal growth, and, the only difference between a rut and the grave is the depth.

In order for my personal homepage to survive, I've hacked it into the past and the present. The deep introspection of the past is in the past. In the present I learn to see outside of me while keeping in touch with the inside of me. The present is a page for my voice, a page for my soul, and a page for ya-ya's.


Weed Wacking, Re-Planting, and Homepage Paraphernalia
I've just finished doing a summer weed-wacking session on fem•mass and loved every moment. Something about seeing a life being lived and uniquely reflected in a good homepage feeds me inside, gives me energy, makes me feel connected. Of course, it hurt to lose so many personal homepages because of too little time, too little interest, or moving on to other things by their owners. But then you plant, plant, plant with new growth, and re-plant a fem•mass'r who got lost in the shuffle.

While cleaning up fem•mass, I've found handy little techniques for fooling those spam bots and junk mail. I've seen some great redesigns, www.kymmi.com and www.willa.com. The invasion of domain names continues: www.kymmi.com, www.susandennis.com, moments.org, and more. As well as the invasion of the gnats that follow your cursor (see here and here). And how about those snappy new personal homepage titles, Green Oatmeal and Other Experiences. And more of you are letting viewers subscribe to your mailing lists. Also, journals are very popular on a lot of personal homepages. I ran across this great essay that should be read by anyone considering keeping a cyberjournal, Why Web Journals Suck.


The Boycotting of Yahoo
Thanks to Jennifer Allison Wand for putting the link on her page regarding the Yahoo Boycott. Apparently since Yahoo bought Geocities, they have decided to change the Terms of Service to include the fact that they own all of the content on the members' homepages as of June 29th.

On June 30th, Yahoo said, "We're seeing how we can clarify our intentions, given the recent outcry." and they now stress that "Yahoo does not own content you submit." See here for more details. Here's where you can read more news stories regarding Yahoo and Geocities.

This has started a movement,The Haunting of Geocities, where members gray out their pages in support of the boycott. After going through a few of the participating homepages, I noticed that people were already pulling up their homepages and moving on to ISPs.

Serves Yahoo right for trying to sneak one past it's acquired homesteaders. Too often these portals run roughshod over it's demographic base, er...members. But what scares me is if this is the way Yahoo behaves, what can we expect from Microsoft? Mu-haha!