Anil Dash

The history told here has many errors and omissions and, I would say, paints a misleading picture.

Markdown did not come up with the idea of lightweight markup languages (LMLs). It just happened to become the most popular one, for reasons that the article doesn’t really address. There were other LMLs before and after Markdown. (It does mention Textile later on, but doesn’t mention that there were a number of others, and that it was a field that had been steadily developing.)

> What if you could just write out the text and then the link, sort of like you might within an email? Like: [Anil Dash’s blog](https://anildash.com)!

No one would ever have spelled it like that. It would rather have been either “Anil Dash’s blog (https://anildash.com)” or “Anil Dash’s blog <https://anildash.com>”.

> If mark_up_ is complicated, then the opposite of that complexity must be… markd_own_.

I’m guessing this was intended to have actual italics. (Clearly it wasn’t checked after writing, or else the third underscore would have been shifted before the d.) This shows one of the problems of Markdown. (“_anti_commercial” later has the same problem.) Also why you should prefer * for italics rather than _ when writing Markdown, because in CommonMark it allows you to mark up partial words. Throw away Prettier’s Markdown formatting, by the way, it’s terrible and if you’re not careful may destroy your content, and it insists on underscore for italics.

> Hitting the Mark

> [Stuff about Markdown…

There are some dueling abstractions, yes! There was a good write-up from Anil Dash that picked up one of my favorite pieces of the recent TabFS write-up[1][2], _Keeping Tabs on Abstractions[3],_ noting that the browser & OS are each running competing abstractions for tabs. The application's invention of the Multi Document Interface (MDI) has done weird things! And I feel like most consumer OSes have done little to try to unify or provide options in the OS level, to take back territory.

I as quite happy & pleased when Google's Chrome on Android had tabs each appear as tabs in the OS. I have too many tabs, but I enjoyed that it was up to my launcher, up to my os to help me work with that. It gave me flexibility & options to approach the problem. Where-as, when Chrome went back to managing tabs itself, it's both been a disaster for me (new tab window shows me the start of my tabs, which has some years old tabs i only need occasionally), and a sadness, a defeat, that the OS can no longer manage this thing.

> I do see the point of reattaching to shell sessions or attaching from multiple devices.

I've recommended dtach[4] elsewhere[5] in this topic & here-by recommend it again! Very lightweight detachable proxy for persistent programs. I run vim inside of it, so I can attach/detach. Vim has terminals inside of it, so that's all I needed.

[1] https://omar.website/tabfs/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600338

[3]…

It might help to expand your horizons a bit. I see a lot of dudes on there I easily spotted for having limited range from the start. The trouble is people like this float too far off the ground and never come down to catch up. They usually lose their touch long before they gain the limelight, but are able to cruise a bit.

The big tell: is "being a public intellectual" all they have? Do they have no experiences with the real world to temper flighty, assumption-based beliefs? Bad news. Even Zeno of Citium saw the world as a merchant while Stoicism was cooking in his head. You can't create or benefit from philosophy isolated from people who challenge your assumptions.

Here's some people to get you started:

On Malik (some interesting photography too): https://om.co/

Anil Dash (appreciates a good Prince pun): https://www.anildash.com/

Judith Butler, just about anything they put out in public.

bell hooks (deceased, but has a lot worth reading)

Adam Savage (lots of good life advice in Q&As): https://www.youtube.com/@tested

Wil Wheaton (yeah I know, but he hit a new gear once he got past alcohol and started really dealing with his childhood trauma): https://wilwheaton.net/

Michael Rosenbaum (played a solid Lex Luthor and now does great interviews): https://www.youtube.com/@InsideOfYouPodcast

Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keating (from Enterprise to interview show): https://www.youtube.com/@ShuttlepodShow/

Speaking of Technorati...the site Technorati. "The Web We Lost" pretty much sums up what I miss: https://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/

The early 2000s had so much promise. The rise of reasonably easy to use blogging platforms, RSS, and web companies that were interested in playing in that world of distributed independent communication. Even Google was a different beast back then. It was the perfect balance: faster paced and more interactive than the days of manually editing files on GeoCities, but still mostly driven by indies doing things because they enjoyed it...instead of the cynical, marketing driven hellscape centered on siloed social media sites.

My pet hypothesis is that we had another Eternal September with the rise of the smartphone. Some of that amazing stuff is still out there, but it's drowned out by the firehose of corporatism and "normal" people. You can even see it with the shift in web sites aiming to be primarily consumed on a phone screen instead of a regular computer.

The manifesto of "have a fucking website" or "I'm a fucking webmaster"[0] or "The People's Web"[1] is something that in the modern age, ends up as a commercialized newsletter or as an e-tip jar or blogspam with a thousand Amazon affiliate links.

The website as a means of personal expression came about because traditional communications media ignored the niches they cared about. Fan sites and shrines covered TV shows or bands that didn't get coverage in mainstream magazines. Conspiracy sites arose because traditional media eschewed them. Today, every niche is covered somewhere, because the Internet became a business.

A GIF site on Geocities was free. Buzzfeed took that idea and became a publicly traded company.

[0] https://justinjackson.ca/webmaster/
[1] https://www.anildash.com/2019/12/23/the-peoples-web/

While this may be somewhat tongue in cheek, I often think of this post from Anil Dash:

"I talk to a lot of consultants, freelancers, and small businesses who do web work, and I used to be a freelancer myself, so sometimes I get asked for advice on how to price one’s goods and services.

I think I came up with my best suggestion today, and it involves only two simple steps:

Slap the client in face.

Tell the client your hourly rate.

If the person looked more shocked, horrified, offended, hurt, saddened, or wounded by the slap in the face, then you are still pricing yourself too low.
Your mileage may vary, this is not to be construed as legal advice, eye-poking may be substituted for slapping in some states."

https://anildash.com/2005/05/12/pay_by_the_hour/