Here is the server making the nerve wracking trip down main St. I realized once there that I could have set it up on the ups and cell phone tether and had it online the whole time. next time.

Drag drop worked for me in Mint linux Firefox 3.6.3. Seems like Mint uses KDE.

...that there are so few active writers on estrip left.

There are so many factors. But to me the obvious 5 seem:
0. Blogging is dying. It requires more effort than the 140 characters of a tweet, text message, or status update to both write and consume. There is nothing stopping people from posting short blogs, but it seems hardly worth it to come up with a title when you are only posting a sentence.

1. The biggest factor - Facebook. Facebook overtook the internet by rekindling people's relationships with their friends, families, and even the person they hung out with for a week at a 3rd grade camping field trip. With a social network of the people you are already comfortable with, and the promise of all of your friend's friends, there isn't much need to try and start fresh with new people or go anywhere else. Because of the very same scenario, an "author" on facebook receives so much more positive feedback from the people that already care about them. To me it seems like the difference between going to a party at your best friends house and meeting a few new people and going to a bar alone where you know nobody.

2. A lot of my good local friends moved away.

3. I have no free time. Between work load, house work and some other issues, I "withdrew from being social" in general. I think I can count the people I actually talk to one one hand. Promoting the site was a big part of getting new writers. Well, that and back then there were few outlets for posting information publicly to the web.

4. I refuse to make an iphone app. In fact, I totally gave up on apple right as they became most popular. Hopefully, the switch to android - which I much prefer - will pay off someday. At least I can now be hired as an android programmer if I need a job ever. But seriously, I refuse to pay $100 to become an iphone dev, when I cannot program it on linux and I have no way of knowing if apple will even accept my app. As you can see from my date cloud in the left column, I have been publishing much more since I got the nexus one than I did 2007, 2008, 2009 with the iphone. Having a native app is easier, especially since stupid fucking apple did not include file upload in their shitty browser to force people to buy into their store.

Just check of my august's for comparison:



Sometimes I wish I had focused on estrip more instead of going the corporate job route, but ultimately I could have totally failed - especially considering the economy - and instead now at least I have a great job.

Its still sad to watch it die out. I guess thats really how everything goes. On the other hand I met so many interesting people, had so many fun experiences and learned so much from it.

All that being said, I personally don't plan on stopping to document my life here or anything, and estrip is going nowhere - so if you are in for the long haul, estrip will be here for you.

And who knows, maybe it will bounce back. Then again not even my own brother (e:mike) writes on it anymore. I guess he doesn't really have his own computer. Maybe I should just re-purpose the software for something else and make a new site in something I am interested in like a tortoise owner journaling site or a linux user journaling site.

I wonder if this is how the WELL people felt after people started going other places online. They were my original inspiration for this although, instead of bringing people together from all over the world, I wanted to bring strangers together from the same place.

Total entries per year for the site. 04 was really the best year of all.

Each user now has a gallery link under their avatar. It links to a display of the blogs that only show the pictures as thumbnails. This iwll only show published blog's images unless you are looking at your own blog. If you click the pics, you see them full size. If you click the date - go link, it loads the blog entry itself. Its an easy way to visually find something you wrote about.

Archiving the old site, I found a bunch of files I had completely forgotten about. Over the years I had used the estrip server as a way to store and transfer data.

I found a site I made to track my bloodpressure over time. A site I made about the elmwood village being a strip and not a village. A ransom note maker for which I had painstakingly cut out each individual letter from artvoice and scanned them.

A million and a half test.php files with little snippets of code I used to test on the go from my phones.

One of the things was a compressed tar file of like 10,000 images my porn bot had scoured off the internet. I am sure I will find more as I explore the backup.

One of the things is the old chat, which was stored in a sqlite database. I am thinking about just pushing the whole thing as is with downloadable db3 file. I was so amazed how that one file help up all those years.

Its so crazy how much stuff is in there. I just wish I could have saved the old paulvisco.org before that got destroyed. I had so much more there.

Also found my thesis about estrip.org. Here are some fun pictures from it.

Nailing up the old banner at the old house on elmwood.


Our biggest party ever with 104 people.


All the themes back in 2005. I really need to make new ones for this site. I feel bad for anyone who does no like green and brown in the meantime, but it seems to fit the weather.


Having fun advertising on elmwood.

Check out the browser's used to access estrip. IE is going away. Chrome has beaten safari but firefox is now at 50% which is pretty incredible considering all the diversity out there.



Here are the mobile browser break downs. Looks like iphone hits slightly more than android, but android visits more when there.

In the pinkest colors ever. I wonder if I will release it this weekend. Its really a toss up between that and fun work projects - who will win.

Easter
Wow, what a day of non-stop eating. I have never had so many desserts. I seriously ate until I thought I was going to die and then came the dessert and snack plates.



On the easter basket front, things have really changed. Instead of the shredded plastic, earth disaster basket - this year my mother filled an eco-friendly, re-usable shopping tote with candy minus any filler. It was great!

I can't wait until tomorrow night - Dyngus Day. As Mr Mike said Easter is really just Dyngus Day eve. Its so awesome that Buffalo has so many different ethnic groups that each have their own holidays. If I lived in some homo-ethnic or western American town I wouldn't have a different ethnic holiday to celebrate each month. Who else is going out?

Site messages
Usually the messages I get are either hate mail, sexual inuendo or advertisers trying to get their product reviewed. Mostly advertisers.

Then I got this nice message today.

I happened across your blog today.

I just wanted to drop you a note and tell you how nice it was to read something that was interesting, had a variety of topics and great images. The art of the blog seems to be a lost art these days and has been replaced by dull, trite and tedious "I'm at the grocery store! Yay me!" Facebook/Twitter updates.

It was a welcome break to read the past 4 years of your blog and to see that you have posted an update in the past 2 days, so it's current.

And you made me miss Buffalo. That's no small feat!

Thanks!

David

All I have to say is, no - thank you David for making me feel better about not being a twit or whatever they are called. You should start a journal, we have a lot of Buffalo expats here. A lot of time s I feel like I am some internet throw back because I don't facebook or twitter my every moment.

Estrip.org is Buffalo's original green publication.

I love how Buffalo Rising is now pretending that being green was a motivating factor in giving up their print publication. I think failed business model and inability to see the obvious death of print was more likely.

Someone keeps accidentally messaging me by clicking on the contact us link at the top instead of messaging the user - they intend to message. I recognize this can be confusing and has been rectified in the new version estrip. However, I thought maybe someone else knows who these messages are for.

I thought the first one could have been about me - but I was not sure what precipitated it and just ignored it. Maybe they meant net culture and was angry about my review of some other site, etc.

01/08/09 21:56@99.50.25.16 Guest wrote:
Hey "idiot," Who died and left you the czar of culture?

Followed the nine days later by:

01/17/09 21:07@99.50.25.16 Guest wrote:
Since you are the Czar of Civilization, at what great university did you gain your credentials as a literary critic?

Since I absolutely hate reading I assume this message was not intended for me. I freely admit that I have not read any literature since I was forced to in primary school, and then some additional German literature in college.