A virtual tour around my digital scrapyard
We are the same people. We still have junk, but now it's electronic
A feature of the post-industrial landscape up to about 15 years ago was the junkyard. Full of metal… things. Cars and ‘fridges, water tanks and oil drums, enormous coils of wire. The ground was inevitably black with pools of oil. And it was a rule that if ever you found yourself in the vicinity it always drizzled.
Of course, it’s different now. There is money in those piles of scrap, which has made the multi-purpose junkyard a thing of the past, especially as they have come under environmental pressure too. We don’t like all that nasty stuff on display, much better to pick it up from the roadside where it’s been fly tipped and stick it in landfill instead (Sorry, I’ll just get that old cynic back in his box)
Nowadays we live in the digital world and the impact of our old virtual garbage is less visible. But we’re still the same people and the digital detritus is all there, skulking quietly on corners of hard drives and the internet. I have had a look around online recently, doing a kind of virtual stock take.
It’s not good news.
From the top, here are some of the contents of my digital scrapyard. Stuff which I don’t throw away now because storage is almost free and instantly available and well, because I’m a lazy bugger.
Website addresses
I live a life broadly free from addiction. Yet residing in my account on a website called 123-reg.com is a guilty secret.
You see I’m forever thinking of wizard schemes and hard on the heels of the thought is the deed. The inevitable enquiry to see if a suitable web domain address is available. Then a feeling of powerlessness overcomes me, like a gambler reaching for the slot machine lever. Which is how I’m currently the shamed-faced owner of over twenty domain names including such showstoppers as sellingmyexperience.com and newworklife.org.
I should say now, before you think that 20 isn’t so bad (oh… you weren’t), included in that number are only the currently licensed domains. I’ve had more, many more, in the past, but my one redeeming attempt at control has always been never to tick “Auto renew” when buying. This means I am forced to confront my folly 12 months later. But at that point I frequently experience exactly the same feeling as when you are cleaning out the attic and you come across that crumpled photo album or that old stamp collection. It’s a combination of “it would be such a shame to throw it away” and “this might actually be worth something”
Which explains for example, why I renewed for several years www.illgetthose.com. I mean, who can’t imagine a site targeted at impulse purchasers which wouldn’t make zillions with that address! Well, eventually I managed, shaking, to avoid pressing the “renew” button.
It’s still available if you want it, I’ve just checked. You’re welcome.
Music
Now I do love my music. Like many of my vintage I had an extensive record collection in the 70’s, replaced by CDs on the 80’s and 90’s (Most of the LPs sold to pay for the new media. Why?…Why?)
Then, around the millennium, when digital music and playback properly arrived I indulged my collecting mania all over again. Today, on a separate hard drive in my desktop I have a folder. It apparently has 27,000 tracks in it. In slight mitigation there are some curios in there which I love. Bootlegs (Beatles Reeperbahn is a particular favourite, as well as a Japanese band playing “Hey Joe” punkified, the words incomprehensible, because although sung in English they don’t actually speak the language. As Fluff Freeman would have said, Marvellous!)
But now 99 percent of the albums and tracks are online. I don’t need them stored on disc as well.
I especially don’t need that additional copy of the 107 gigabytes stored on the backup hard drive next to it. Or the one in the cloud on OneDrive, or the copy on Google Drive. I’m afraid offhand I can think of a couple more copies too, but it now sounds a bit silly.
Just a bit.
Well, I told you I do love my music.
Oh, and in the manner of a criminal asking for other crimes to be taken into consideration, I have done the exact same with my photography. Except worse because the damned photos have steadfastly resisted any attempts at curation over the years. The idea of photos being instantly available to me wherever I am evokes with me only a hollow laugh.
Websites
Having ‘fessed up to rampant domain addiction, we now move on to websites which do actually exist. Not quite such a lengthy roll call, but there they are, all up there on the www, mouldering quietly.
Starting with the least offensive. I created my own business site during The Great Hiatus, www.gswilliams.co.uk. I don’t mind that one too much. It has a purpose and I managed to rein in my compulsion to over complicate things. Plus, it has a nice picture of me on the front page. So there’s that. I did one for my Dad too when it became obvious that his contemporaries were all too frail to attend his funeral and relatives were dispersed to the four winds, www.taffwilliams.com. That one’s OK in a sort of amateurish way.
But…like the contents of that suitcase in the corner of the attic which turns out to contain things of great value, I am genuinely ashamed to confess that Susie’s website (www.susieloveoriginals.com) is a bloody disgrace.
It was one of the first I created using a photo site called SmugMug (!). We both spent hours when Susie was selling her glass creating a rather splendid showcase of painstakingly photographed pictures. But subsequent site upgrades forced on unwitting users has robbed it of it’s functionality. You can see the pictures still but it’s not good. Not good at all. I will move the site away from its current home when I get a minute, well a day (I’m no good at this stuff!). Honest.
Bringing up the rear a couple of sites that also arrived with Covid-induced cabin fever.
My photography site www.gwimage.com Has some nice pics on it, but like so many millions of other sites, it needs curation and maintenance, which I haven’t done. For nostalgia fans there are plenty of lockdown references and the blog was last updated in 2020. Worst of all there’s a rather po-faced insert about my deliberations when buying a new camera (which got sold in turn not too long after). Now as a service I will share Gareth’s iron law of website creation: Never never, include a blog page on a site unless you will suffer physical or financial pain should you fail to post at least one a month. No exceptions.
And finally, like the rotting starling under the eaves, comes a last, rancid-smelling emission from the Covid era. While the world was working from home I thought “Now there’s a segment that could use it’s very own website”, and so www.WFHwork.com spluttered into being. What can I say. I was bored… very bored. And you will be too if you spend too long on it. It represented an attempt to get into the world of websites which become a respected resource for those times when, say, you want to know how to dress for a virtual meeting, all the while generating me advertising revenue. I know - Stupid!
So, there you have it.
What a mess… but I know I’m not alone in this digital oily puddle in the corner of the yard. I suppose I could stage some kind of virtual intervention, but really, you never know when you’ll need to hear the Stackridge album “A Victory for Common Sense”. Or see that blurry picture you took in 1978 of that girl you went out with for a few weeks, but whose name you can’t now remember.
But in reality there’s only one conclusion to be drawn. In true Stockholm Syndrome style, I may have come to love my digital captor and so I’ll happily take the downside.
Oh, and you will notice that there is one website missing from the scroll of shame, www.workingalternative.co.uk . The site consolidates all the newsletters posted so far and has one overwhelming advantage, namely its creation happens automatically, courtesy of Substack and I am powerless to balls it up. Yes, it’s a great way to recommend the newsletter to anyone. (See what I did there……)