Thursday, July 31, 2014

How Do I Escape Facebook with My Art

The first part of solving this problem is never give your art to Facebook as they own everything on their servers.  Is your art somewhere you can touch it, control it, manage it?  If not then why did you put it there.  Never do this.

You can set up your own Web site a variety of ways.  The easiest is to go to various sites that will build one for you using easy-to-follow, sometimes graphic instructions.  There is some strength in this for relatively low-level applications as maybe you want to pump up your kid's Little League team or some such.  The biggest drawback to such sites is that they will load you and your friends down with trackers (i.e. cookies that can be used to discover what you do).

Note:  Facebook loads you with trackers also, at least half a dozen.  They do it because they're moneymakers and many other unscrupulous Web sites do this as well.

Setting up your Web site from scratch has the huge advantage of flexibility and one aspect of that is no cookies go out to anyone unless you send them.  There are legitimate reasons for using cookies in your code, tracking people is not one of them.  You have control of this as you write the code.  It's your site, do whatever you want with it.

The way most people learn programming is to read stuff other people have written and then change it just a little bit to see what happens.  That mechanism has carried me for, oh, a huge part of forty years.  It's a bitch but it works.  Eventually you learn how to program.

So, yes.  The answer is to find a friend to help you build it.  Tell your friend specifically not to try to impress you as eventually you will have to take care of it yourself.  Maybe your friend goes to Vegas, gets drunk and marries a hooker.  Things happen and the person who wrote the code is long gone.

Most of all, think what you want.  Look at Web sites, standalone Web sites and not Mickey Mouse imitations in social networks, and look what they do.  From this think of what you want your own site to do.  All you need is the idea.  There is someone who can make it happen.  Sometimes that costs some jingle and sometimes it doesn't but that's a different problem.

Yes, you are one among billions on the open Internet and there is some comfort in being all warm and chummy with your friends in a social network ... but ... there is no identity in it.  Be somebody, even if it's one in a billion.   Be the one.

For basics, I'm paying $120 US a year for unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage.  The ISP has generally been exceptionally reliable with fast response and excellent availability.  Their current rate for new accounts is $180 US a year for the same thing.  My rate is because I've been with them so long.  I won't name them so it's clear to you I'm not selling anything.

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