// December 25th, 2009 // 5 Comments » // Website
…Ignore the potential fire hazard.
I hope your last Christmas of this decade isn’t too shocking (heh, heh).
Roll on 2010!
Archive for Website
// November 4th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Internet, NaBloPoMo, Website
How old do you think children should be before they join social networks like Facebook and MySpace?
The Vox QoTD got me thinking. I’m not a parent, nor will I be for hopefully a very long time. But I am an internet user, who has been part of the online world from a very young age. I’ve looked at the answers to this question on the Vox homepage, and most of them come from parents who are scared of their children being corrupted/groomed online, and suggest ridiculous ages before they let their kids join websites like Facebook and MySpace. Numbers like 12, 14 and 16 pop up frequently, and even then they say they’ll put in parental controls to keep tabs on their children.
Just FYI, parental controls are bloody obvious. When you’re on a public network or a work area, where your activity is monitored, you subconsciously don’t visit the sites you normally visit at home, because you don’t want your boss knowing what you do on Facebook. It’s the same with parental controls. Children with parental controls installed on their computers will know not to go on the websites they normally go on at friends’ houses, in case you might be watching.
If you don’t think your tween/teen has had some form of persona on a social networking site already, then the chances are, you’re wrong. Maybe they signed up at their friend’s house, putting in a variety of fake details so they won’t get caught by you; a fake name, a different picture, a relative’s birthday. Your children are smarter than you give them credit for.
You see, an online life is just an extension of real life. Parties are planned, pictures are uploaded, and gossip is discussed on websites like Facebook. All too often a person without an account on one of these websites will be left out because people just forget; they assume that everyone is on the same website as they are. 12/13 year olds are no exception to this – they plan birthday parties, arrange meetings with friends and do the same things a college student would do, only possibly in a more innocent way. More and more young people are moving their social lives to the internet, and leaving others behind.
I started playing around on the internet when I was 8 or 9 without any parental supervision. My mother is computer-illiterate, and there weren’t that many parental controls for the Windows 95 system, anyway. In all my time on the internet, I managed to learn the good and bad things for myself. I chatted to many people online, but if someone made me feel uncomfortable, I blocked and/or reported them.
If someone asked me personal questions like where I went to school or my address, it just seemed logical to ignore and block them. The one thing I was encouraged not to do was to upload pictures of myself online. I didn’t have a webcam, there were no photos scanned in, and with the vast number of free avatars and display pictures available for free, why would I need a picture?
Without being encouraged to explore, I probably would never have learnt how my computer worked, how websites were created, and who I could and could not trust on the internet. I’ve developed ninja skillz from being left to my own devices. ^_^
The one thing that’s different from my internet experience and the experiences of those using it now is the abundance of social networking websites, where people are encouraged to put down every single detail of their lives. But, to balance it out, younger people get much more education than I did when I first began using the internet. From an early age, young people are constantly being surrounded with tips and advice on how to stay safe on the web. Don’t meet anyone you know online, never give out any personal information, never share any pictures of yourself… All the stuff that took me years to learn for myself.
Most of it boils down to common sense, really. >.> Anyone you’re communicating on the internet with is basically a stranger, no matter how long you’ve talked to each other for. You don’t know how they walk, talk, if they have any neuroses – all the things that would normally form your first impressions of someone.
Would anyone go off into a secluded park with some stranger they’ve met on a bus? No. It’s not that much different with an online acquaintance. To stretch out this long metaphor, you’re all on an online bus. If a random stranger you met on the other side of town offers to walk you home alone, well, you see where this is going…
If parents don’t let their children become experienced in the online world, then they’re going to have problems when they finally get a chance to experience it. As long as good judgement is taught from an early age, then parents shouldn’t have any qualms about trusting their children to make the right decisions. After all, trust is what it all boils down to in the end; the earlier parents learn to trust their children online, the better.
Just think about it this way: an 8 year old needs help when they want to go somewhere. A 14 year old doesn’t. It’s easier to stop an 8 year old from meeting their online friend than it is a 14 year old.
// December 31st, 2008 // 3 Comments » // Me, Website
I’m sorry I haven’t posted here for a while. So many weird and wonderful things (ooh, alliteration!) have happened in the last month that I could’ve blogged about, but I didn’t. Why? I honestly have no clue. The time just flew away. You know, when I started blogging again earlier in the year, I told myself that this time, the blogging was for myself, and myself alone – a record of my life. Who cares if no one reads it?
The truth is, I do.
As much as I try to convince myself that I don’t, some part of me will always want a large ‘fan’ base, comments, interaction… You know the deal. I promised myself that this time, it would be different. I’d actually put some effort into maintaining this website, after so many years of neglect. That promise I made to myself obviously failed… The first thing I had on my list was to create a layout, and I don’t see that happening any time soon, at the pace I’m going.
Several years ago, I used to put most of my time into running websites, making sure everything – translation: almost nothing – worked, affiliating with others, etc. The key thing that’s changed now is the lack of time I have. Days go by so quickly, weeks are a blur, and months fade into each other without any significance.
Hopefully, one day, I’ll be able to take this whole website malarkey seriously again. Until then, I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with performing at a substandard level, for lack of better words. I hate that, but there’s really nothing I can do to change it.
// October 20th, 2008 // No Comments » // Internet, Website
glomp.me, a domain I bought a few months ago and left to rot, is having a revival. A bunch of talented developers, artists, designers (and procrastinating half-arsed coders like me) are having a discussion on what to do with it. Oh, and we like to plurk.
So, what do you want to see on glomp.me? Join in the discussion on taser.glomp.me (yes the subdomain idea was entirely my fault).
// September 2nd, 2008 // No Comments » // NaBloPoMo, Website
I have a hard time articulating what I really want to say, even in this blog. There are so many things that go left unsaid, or I begin to start writing about them, but then don’t know how to continue. They sit as drafts, wanting to be finished, but I really don’t know how to.
It’s strange that I find it hard to write eloquently, considering that I never say much in real life. You’d think I’d have some words left for things like this, don’t you?
… I really didn’t mean this to be one of those poetic posts that end up sounding slightly emo as well.
// August 16th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Me, Nostalgia, Website
On the 25th of December 2005, I registered twilightlullaby.net via my current host, ToastyHost, probably because I was bored at Christmas, and hey, what better way to do that than to pick random words that sounded weird together and register a domain? I already owned a domain previously (we’ll skip over the part about how I was so excited the year before to be finally getting a .com!!!111oneoneone!!!!), but I ditched my old domain name for this one, because I thought it sounded better. Srsly, WTF was I thinking?! twilightlullaby.net became my personal website of sorts, with crap layouts, weird blogs, and stupid tutorials. In fact, I still have a lot of twilightlullaby.net’s stuff in a ZIP file on my computer.
I was pretty proud of it at the time, but let’s face it, it was utter crap! The layouts were all fixed width and aligned to the left, would not display properly in any other screen resolution outside of 1024 x 768 (although I optimised it for 800 x 600 for some strange reason), and wouldn’t work in any browser outside of Firefox. Not because I was ‘elite’, but because I had just discovered Firefox and thought it was the coolest thing on earth (mainly because it loaded a hell of a lot faster than IE, and had a lot of cool addons), and accidentally uninstalled all my other browsers, thinking that all code would display the same, no matter what browser it was on. Oh, how n00bish of me. My website was a classic example of Web 1.0, haha.
Later on in the year, I discovered NaNoWriMo, and ditched my ‘beloved’ – I use that term lightly because I was really starting to get bored of it by then – website in order to finish writing a 50000 word novel. At the end of the month, my novel was completed, I’d met a lot of new friends, and hadn’t updated the website since the beginning of the month. Yep, procrastination had sunk in. I put the website on an open hiatus, thinking I would save it for a rainy day. Just when I was thinking about actually doing something to my website again, something went wrong.
During that November, I was so busy writing that I didn’t notice at all that my host, ToastyHost, was having major problems. Well, when I came back, I saw for myself. There was downtime on a Twitter scale, the host couldn’t be contacted, and, worst of all, when I registered, the domain came free with the hosting, i.e. I had no control over it whatsoever, and couldn’t change the nameservers.
When the time came to renew my hosting again, I just wasn’t able to do it. ToastyHost had died, my domain was gone, and I waved goodbye to my crappy little personal site. 
Three years later, I was randomly doing searches on Whois, when I saw that this domain name was available again. Not surprisingly, no one had wanted to buy it in the 3 years it had been held by the registrar – I couldn’t be bothered to buy it back because of the bloody expensive fee the registrar was charging.
After much discussion on Plurk about whether to buy it or not, I bought twilightlullaby.net again. Basically, I wanted this domain for nostalgia.
Three years on, I hope I’ve learnt from my bloated code, my appallingly bad taste in layouts, and general suckiness. If you think that I haven’t, feel free to poke me and tell me what I’m doing wrong. I’m currently using a premade Wordpress theme at the moment to avoid making any Wordpress themes. 
Also, twilightlullaby.net’s name may be crap, but it’s become a little piece of my history that I can’t bear to get rid of, if you know what I mean.
I will still blog on Vox occasionally (well, I’m certainly crossposting with it at the moment), but for now, this domain, with all its’ history, shall be my main blog.
Welcome back, twilightlullaby.net. In retrospect, I really did miss you quite a bit.
