I’m putting on a Jam

Link to the Jam:

It’s been a little while since I last posted. Over the last month, I spent some time putting together my journal index, which categorizes my posts up to now. Hopefully, it will be a more personal & usable alternative to having a search feature for my posts. I’ve also been playing a lot of Tears of the Kingdom and having a blast with it.

My occasion for writing today is an upcoming event I’m hosting for the Ctrl-C server community. Ctrl-C has been a wonderful online home for me over the past year and a half. I love having this easy-going and friendly group of computer tinkerers to share a website with.

Ctrl-C is just one of a constellation of “tilde servers”, public Unix servers that give away free shell accounts to users. The first contemporary tilde server was started by a guy named Paul Ford in 2014. In his post describing the founding of tilde.club, he has a great paragraph about what he loves about the project:

I’d taken this thing on myself and was paying to keep it going. But look at it another way: I was getting paid in web pages. I am a man who loves web pages. Not an activity feed, not structured tweets or organized blog posts, no brand messages, just pure raw weird signal. Like walking down a street in a new city at night and seeing all the signs, blinking and bright and in languages you don’t quite understand.

This is the best description I’ve found of what personally appeals to me about Ctrl-C. I love the creative potential of web pages, and I love to see people expressing their own personal flare with the medium. Gomepage is my own serious attempt to create a webpage as personal expression.

I’ve seen some great user pages on Ctrl-C. There are too many to name, but just a few I find especially fun include ~pgadey, ~neo, and ~megymagy. But I want more. I want more novel HTML creations, especially from some of the many users who simply have a “Hello World”, “Coming Soon”, or “Under Construction” as their only sign of life.

So with that in mind, I decided to put on an event to encourage the Ctrl-C I want to see. The details are available on the main page for the event. If you are a Ctrl-C user, I encourage you to join us and build something wonderful!

For a while now, I’ve wanted to make some durable contribution to the larger Ctrl-C community. I’m not as handy at scripting as some of the other users, and I usually abandon programming projects, so I haven’t managed to make a contribution of code. Maybe I’ll run this event annually, and that will be my way of helping build up the culture of this server.

Do you love reading personal web pages? Do you have a personal site of your own? Are you a member of a tilde server? Have you ever participated in a jam of any kind? Let me know your thoughts at my Ctrl-C email: gome ​@ ​ctrl-c.club.