Update #51 | Rebuilding Process + My Magnum Opus

This took quite a bit of time and I still want to add a bookish resources section and also include my own book reviews to the mix, but I got the most important parts done, which was redoing the member directory and setting up the application page. I really love what I did with the member directory. Each member has their own cute little avatar that represents them, and when you click on them it opens up their directory listing with info on each member and links to their website, social media, RSS feed, etc.

I’ve also reimplemented the member RSS feed, so when anyone stumbles across the Book Ring, they can see all the latest bookish posts by our members. I feel like this is such a great feature that really ties together this space being more than just a webring, but a community. I’ve been trying to figure out how to make the Book Ring more of a community, and I think making it a sort of social network (as I did before very briefly), kind of defeats the purpose of the personal web’s decentralized structure. But I think RSS feeds really kind of solve that issue, and makes the book ring more of an community hub of sorts that supports discovery and connection in a decentralized landscape. Anyways, I’m still learning and experimenting with different ideas on how to keep improving this and building more around this kind of structure. Hopefully I can think of more things to add that are in the same spirit in the future.

After about a year of trying to figure out how exactly I wanted to decorate my site visually, inspiration hit me via one of my favorite childhood games; Maplestory. Granted, I obviously don’t own any of their assets, but Nexon has been extremely lenient with users using their assets for Maplestory in personal use fan creations over the years, and according to their IP Policy for content creators, I feel my usage of their assets on my site falls within acceptable use. I’ve also been mindful to edit the images I use to make it more personal to my style I want for my site. But let this update be my direct credit to them that many of the backgrounds and NPC art I use for my site going forward is likely edited Maplestory assets and that I don’t claim ownership over them – only my own creative ideas behind my usage of them. My usage of their assets will always be for personal use only, and eventually I’ll get around to making a proper credits page.

I made this decision because I do want to move away from the generative art I was using before, despite making my own heavy edits to most of it. I don’t have the time or energy to make all of the artwork for my website from scratch. I can draw, I wouldn’t say amazingly, but it’s not something I’m passionate about to spend a lot of time on. My creativity lies more in design, building frameworks and interactive ideas, which I think is why I love my website so much because that’s the majority of what I get to do here. I also love writing (if you couldn’t tell by a lot of my super long rambly posts). But the point is, I’m not an illustrator, and there’s a very big difference creatively between being a designer and being an illustrator. Those are two very different creative mediums. I can illustrate to a reasonable extent, but not in a way that I would feel happy covering my website with all of my illustrations, nor do I even want to take the time to focus my energy on that. It’s just not something I enjoy doing enough to want to do, at least, not at this current point in time.

Now that I have dedicated hosting again, I’ve decided to not use subdomains for anything. Subdomains act as totally separate website installs, and separate installs take up a lot of resources on my hosting. I’d really like to minimize unnecessary usage going forward, so separate sections of my site are just going to be better organized structurally here. This means that everything I had before as subdomains, like my cottage, library, sovereignweb, etc will now just be part of thecozy.cat. I feel bad that my backlinks are all messed up now. A lot of people who have linked to different pages of my site before are going to get 404 pages, but this would have happened regardless since my website was hacked and I had to rebuild. So if I’m going to just merge everything back to my primary domain, doing it now makes the most sense.

I’ve created all pages, now I just need to add to them. I will have to redo resource posts like my RSS feed guide post but that’s not really priority right now.

The Resources page is back up. If you previously had it bookmarked, be sure to bookmark this new link as that is where it will be from now on.
The Join page for the Sovereign Web Ring is back up. New members can apply again, and old members can update their webring widgets. Getting the directory back up is still a work in progress.

The updated widget and join page can be found here. Getting the directory back up is still a work in progress.

I’ve been feeling inspired to create a shareable/copyable resource page for freedom and privacy resources. Here in Canada, bills are being rushed through and passed that are setting Canada up to become an Orwellian surveillance state. Digital ID is eerily close with Bill C-34 and we’re on the same path to become like the UK very soon with bills C-8, C-9, and C-22.

I’ve been interested in privacy since around 2012ish. Granted, I haven’t always been consistent with it but the topic has always been in my orbit and I do care about it. I’ve also learned a great deal about community initiatives outside of big tech, in A LOT of different areas. I feel like I have a firm, grounded stance on how people can effectively fight back, without violence. Right now, I feel like people are just running around in circles panicking, not really knowing what to do, waiting for a mass revolution to suddenly happen, or for someone else to step up and lead them. I don’t think that’s going to happen, and I don’t think we should be putting the responsibility on somebody else to figure it out for us. But I do think we hold A LOT of power on an individual level that we can and should be utilizing, starting now; we have our time, our attention, our energy, and our dollar. We don’t need to resort to violence, we can simply choose to opt out, and there are a plethora of resources available to us to do exactly that. My goal in creating this page is to compile vast amounts of resources and teach people how to start this shift and opt out. Protect privacy, protect freedom, protect self sovereignty, and start building a parallel society that doesn’t rely on the corrupt system anymore. This page is not the end all to this journey, but a launchpad so people can start taking action now on the individual level.

I also don’t want to gatekeep this information, so I encourage everyone to share, copy, redistribute, and contribute to this resources page however you see fit. Comment and leave resources you’d like me to add to the page and I’ll see about categorizing it accordingly. Also feel free to copy the page and host it on your own website if you want to, and add your own contributions to it. I’ll have download links for a static version of the page up soon that I’ll regularly keep updated.

The page is actively under construction, but anyone can start using it now. There’s already a lot of great information up on there, and I want people to know about it so people can start contributing to it. I want this to be collaborative. You can find it here: https://thecozy.cat/sovereignweb/freedom-privacy-resources/