State of the Domain

First off, to any­one that sent me an e‑mail over the past month, it seems that a few were eat­en by the serv­er between main­te­nance cycles. Appar­ent­ly there was a spool­ing error which has since been sort­ed out, so if you did­n’t receive a response, please re-send as needed!

And now for some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent … pho­tos of the ongo­ing jour­ney, and some thoughts on the future of this domain.

Reflections

I’ve been con­sid­er­ing the future direc­tion and focus of this domain. There have been large gaps between updates over the last few years, par­tic­u­lar­ly since 2010, and I feel I owe it to my read­ers that we stay on the same page as far as site oper­a­tions are concerned.

I’ve owned crimsonhalo.com in one form or anoth­er since its launch in Feb­ru­ary 2003, and next year will be the ten-year anniver­sary. I’ve most­ly been doing it as a pas­time, and it still holds my inter­ests to this day because of the man­i­fold oppor­tu­ni­ties it presents for learn­ing and form­ing con­nec­tions. The same goes for my news media work and sim­i­lar endeavours.

Why own a domain?

Hav­ing a per­son­al space on the World Wide Web serves a lot of very use­ful pur­pos­es, with sev­er­al impor­tant advan­tages. It makes the real­i­ties of dis­trib­ut­ing one’s own work sev­er­al orders of mag­ni­tude eas­i­er, and when you sign up with the right host, it’s a great facil­i­ta­tor of free speech. With no mid­dle man or ridicu­lous third par­ty TOS agree­ments to wor­ry about (oth­er than your provider con­tract), cre­at­ing a per­son­al net­work becomes its own reward.

This is not the case with main­stream social media sites like Twit­ter and Face­book, where cen­sor­ship and con­tent rejec­tion are a reg­u­lar­ly occur­ring phe­nom­e­non. When using those sites, you’re expect­ed to give up a cer­tain amount of pri­va­cy and free­dom to sim­ply gain access to the ser­vice. Also, since those sites use large teams of helpdesk work­ers for their con­tent and pol­i­cy enforce­ment, con­sis­ten­cy is often a prob­lem and indi­vid­ual instances can vary wide­ly from agent to agent.

Focal point

At the end of the day, this place is still a per­son­al site at its heart. While there will be some mate­ri­als to aid an ongo­ing search for bet­ter work, most of what ends up here is orig­i­nal con­tent and art I’ve cre­at­ed, along with news and blog posts.

When the site was revised in 2011 and giv­en its the new lay­out, I decid­ed to focus more on mak­ing it into a library of my own works, span­ning more than a decade of my life.

Content selection standards

When it comes to what gets pub­lished, I’ve always believed there exists a fine line between tact and tacky. Some­thing that peri­od­i­cal­ly comes up is the ques­tion of how deep one may be will­ing to delve into their pri­vate life online.

While I’ve been online since 1996 and am part of the so-called Face­book gen­er­a­tion, I don’t buy into the idea of telling all to ran­dom strangers because at its core, it eschews mean­ing­ful, con­struc­tive thought process­es in favour of seek­ing cheap atten­tion. That’s not my style.

Being intro­spec­tive in ways that pos­i­tive­ly engages one’s read­ers is tact­ful. Mak­ing the Inter­net a soap­box for air­ing all of one’s dirty laun­dry isn’t. Some things are bet­ter han­dled in real life, in pri­vate, in a more direct and hon­est man­ner, because it’s sim­ply the right thing to do.

It also bears remem­ber­ing that dozens of auto­mat­ed archive bots exist on the Inter­net, every one of them con­stant­ly grab­bing new screen shots of every site they can find in prepa­ra­tion for search index­ing and data caching. Thus, with this pow­er comes a huge lev­el of respon­si­bil­i­ty: just because a per­son can say some­thing in a pub­lic venue does­n’t mean they nec­es­sar­i­ly need to, or even that one should. Once some­thing lives online, it lives near­ly for­ev­er, and when it draws neg­a­tive atten­tion, the poten­tial for dam­age runs high.

The right to free­dom of speech is cor­rect­ly coun­ter­bal­anced by the inter­ests of those so affect­ed, and by the expec­ta­tion that one must prac­tice basic jour­nal­is­tic ethics and pro­to­cols in the course of car­ry­ing out their endeavours.

These are the guide­lines I strive to uphold in my per­son­al space online, par­tic­u­lar­ly when it comes to engag­ing top­ics that fall in the pub­lic domain and inter­est. So, while most of the con­tent that ends up here will sim­ply be my own art, poet­ry, designs, or sto­ries, it’s impor­tant for my read­ers to know that what sets this site apart from the rest is my aware­ness that the fun and ben­e­fits of blog­ging are only won by strong responsibility.