What does 'ephemera' mean on this website?
tl;dr - 'Ephemera' is a section of my site which links to things which aren't by me. Often this is a link to content elsewhere on the web - a new song, a clever website, a cool blogpost - but will occasionally have quotes and content which exists primarily outside of the web
When I migrated across to the current version of my website, the homepage displayed three different lists of items:
That third category was my initial attempt to have a built-in linklog, something I've previously mentioned as something I find particularly joyful. It's links to things from elsewhere on the web, mostly happy little videos, websites, images, or blogs.
This is the best part of the olde worlde web for me - someone creates or discovers something and others share it more widely. It's reblogging, if you like, just in a more manual form.
But this presents a problem. The world is bigger than the web. Amazing, intelligent, brilliant thoughts and media and quotes and beliefs have been created for thousands of years pre-Internet, and every day new amazing, intelligent, brilliant thoughts and media and quotes and beliefs don't necessarily enter the digital domain.
Good stuff exists beyond the web.
Often, some of that good stuff has been shared on the web already, and when it gives greater context or new insights it feels correct to share a link. For example I linked to this website which compiles old prerecorded answerphone tapes because someone's gone to the effort to hunt the tapes down, to digitise them, and to present them in a really nice way1.
What if I find a brilliant quote from the mid-1960s and the only record online is from a slightly scummy ad-filled aggregator? Or a 15th century etching that now only reliably appears online in an AI-filled nonsense page? Or a Victorian photograph, or a few lines from a novel, or a still from a movie?
My site's structure didn't allow me to easily post those things. I could write a blogpost about each offline thing, I guess. I could set up a whole new site elsewhere just for the purposes of these things but that negates my whole attempt to create one single site.
So a tweak became necessary.
My site now has three main sections:
- My main blog posts
- A list of slashpages
Links from the webEphemera
'Ephemera' broadly means content produced by someone else but which I want to point to. It will still mostly consist of posts linking to something elsewhere on the internet, but it may be a quote from a book or a print seen in a gallery or anything at all.
Even if the page itself is sadly no longer online. It still exists in the Internet Archive though.↩