In February 1949, the U.S. Army published Personal Conduct for the Soldier, a pamphlet of etiquette and good behavior for its soldiers, a “code of personal good conduct” for daily life.

Nearly every page includes a cartoon illustration, covering subjects like loyalty, respect, self-control, and respect for women and minorities.

Someone please give a copy to the President-Elect.

“In the past, some wars have been started by ill-mannered tyrants who believe their countries and their people superior to all other countries and all other people. They didn’t believe in consideration for others. It was much too late when they learned that lack of respect for others doesn’t pay.”

“Americans, however, who live among people from all parts of the world, have no excuse for being ignorant, intolerant, or prejudiced against any class of people. Each has a right to choose his friends and is entitled to civil respect from all others.”

“When you lose your temper, you do and say things you regret—that you may regret till the end of your days.”

“Beware of the man who speaks disrespectfully of women… Ladies do not like the whistling and catcalls and the personal remarks that ‘drug-store cowboys’ hurl in their direction.”

The pamphlet is part of the Internet Archive’s Manual Library, a collection of nearly 75,000 scanned technical and instructional manuals—a treasure trove of archival materials.

Thanks to Jason Scott for his effort in collecting these manuals, and pointing me to this particular one on Twitter.

 

After nearly a decade, invite-only music tracker What.cd closed today and deleted all its data after a raid by French authorities—a sad end to what was likely the largest, most active private torrent tracker ever.

Founded the day Oink’s Pink Palace closed in 2007, What.cd managed to survive for nearly a decade, including several crippling DDOS attacks.

It may have flaunted copyright law, but collectively, What.cd’s dedicated group of fans worked together to create the most comprehensive, organized, and metadata-rich collection of music online.

All site and user data has been destroyed. So long, and thanks for all the fish. <3 2/2

— What.CD (@whatcd) November 17, 2016

What.cd, like most private trackers, operated on a ratio system—you could only download if you were actively uploading, donating, or otherwise making the site better.

While most of its members were invited by someone in the community, What.cd provided the unusual option of an open interview process. Applicants were expected to study preparation materials on site rules and encoding guidelines, conduct a speed test, and interview with a volunteer moderator in IRC. (Don’t expect to ace the interview, either.)

Their focus on quality and comprehensiveness was relentless. They encouraged original encodings at high-quality, with automated tools to check logs, verifying encoding, and culling out low-quality rips.

The ultimate goal was perfection. Every release should have a perfect lossless rip and the “perfect 3” MP3s—V0, V2, and 320 MP3 encodings—along with all accompanying metadata, consistent file names, folders, tags, and album art. What.cd provided tools for finding releases that could use improvement, giving everyone an easy chance to improve their ratio.

The developers open-sourced Gazelle, their web framework, and Ocelot, their large-scale BitTorrent tracker, which became the foundation for hundreds of other private torrent communities.

In addition to organizing music into discographies and collages, users could make requests for specific releases, spending their ratio to drive up the demand for rare releases. As a result, out-of-print and unreleased material often found its way to What.cd, occasionally putting it in the headlines.

An unreleased Radiohead song, unpublished JD Salinger stories, and Microsoft’s forensic tools for law enforcement all made headlines when they appeared exclusively on the site for the first time.

The result was likely the most comprehensive and well-organized music archive ever—over a million unique releases—assembled entirely by passionate music fans operating outside of copyright law.

what.cd was the largest and most meticulous library of recorded music ever assembled, as far as I can tell. Sad it had to end this way.

— Parker Higgins (@xor) November 17, 2016

It will be missed.

 

Last month, we decided to wait to release the XOXO talk videos until after the election—when the stress and anxiety of this political train wreck would finally be over.

Yeah. Well.

Half of our members are women. 20% of our members are people of color. Several members are queer and/or trans. All of them now face the grim prospects of living in a country actively working to roll back their personal rights and freedoms.

XOXO is hard for me to write about. Too much of myself is wrapped up in it — it’s easily the most exhausting, challenging, and meaningful thing I’ve worked on.

In September, we held XOXO for the fifth year. Like past years, we made a short video to remember XOXO 2016 by. If you’ve never been, it does a pretty great job of capturing what it’s all about. Thanks to Searle Video for their hard work on it, and the incredibly talented Jim Guthrie for the soundtrack. I hope you like it.

Every year, we’ve said we don’t know if we’ll do XOXO again. This isn’t some bullshit marketing tactic: we take it one year at a time, and each might be the last. But this year, we knew we needed a break to work on other projects and rethink where we want it to go.

So XOXO won’t happen in 2017, and we haven’t decided beyond that. It might return in 2018. Or it might not. And that’s okay! It makes it feel a bit more special that way, and I’m so proud of what we’ve done in five years and the incredible community that’s coalesced around it.

We’ll start releasing the talk videos right after the election—if Trump loses. Stay tuned.

“Redesigning your blog” in 2016 is an anachronism. Like tweaking your Gopher presence or upgrading your ham radio, even talking about blogging feels like a throwback — an exercise in nostalgia for an independent web whose time has passed.

The death of blogging was foretold almost every year since its inception. Greg Knauss was ahead of the curve, arguing blogging would be a short-lived fad three months after Blogger launched in 1999.

But I think Jason Kottke nailed it back in 2013.

Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.

If you have any doubt that blogs are dead, here’s a fun thought experiment: name a notable independent, single-author blog that launched in the last two or three years. I can’t think of one. Can you?

There are undoubtedly new blogs starting, and many more happily spinning along in various niches, but they’re not really part of the cultural conversation anymore.

This is blogging in 2016.

*sigh* pic.twitter.com/RaSIRNldSF

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) September 20, 2016

I’m not a big fan of nostalgia. There’s stuff I love about the past, but I generally think things are more interesting now than ever.

More people than ever before are able to express themselves on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Medium, YouTube, Pinterest, and countless other social platforms. All of that is great.

 

But there a few reasons why I’m sad about the decline of independent blogging, and why I think they’re still worth fighting for.

Ultimately, it comes down to two things: ownership and control.

Last week, Twitter announced they’re shutting down Vine. Twitter, itself, may be acquired and changed in some terrible way. It’s not hard to imagine a post-Verizon Yahoo selling off Tumblr. Medium keeps pivoting, trying to find a successful revenue model. There’s no guarantee any of these platforms will be around in their current state in a year, let alone ten years from now.

Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web.

But the ecosystem for independent publications is fundamentally broken. Getting discovered, building a readership, and profiting from your work as an independent writer are all much, much harder than they used to be.

Needless to say, I have thoughts about all of these things.

It feels dire, but there are bright lights out there—writers trying new things and finding an audience on their own terms—and new experiments worth trying. More about that soon.

 

So I redesigned my blog. I’ve written before about how blogging changed my life, and I still feel like there’s interesting potential in this medium.

It’s given me exposure, a place to share my projects and crazy experimentation with technology. It’s created new opportunities for me, directly or indirectly responsible for every major project I’ve gotten involved in. It’s a place to play and experiment with ideas, some of which led to big breakthroughs and passions. And it connected me to people who cared about the things I did, many of whom became lifelong friends.

After 14 years of blogging, I switched from MovableType to WordPress. The design is finally responsive, though pretty minimalist for now with lots of rough edges. It took some effort, but I preserved the links to everything I’ve ever written—472 posts and 15,891 links.

The RSS feeds should redirect appropriately, though inevitably marking everything as new because I couldn’t migrate GUIDs. (Just mark everything as read if you’re using a feedreader. Sorry about that.) Hopefully, I’m not interrupting the various network of Twitter bots, feedreaders, and IFTTT rules that rely on it.

Some stuff is broken, and there’s a long laundry list of stuff I want to fix and add.

It’s under construction, a work in progress — like me and the rest of the web. Thanks for sticking around.