This post was born of some good old-fashioned link hopping. I started out on Robert Birming’s
list of blogging resources
. From there I found a link to <htmlhead.dev> a page describing various things you should or might want to put in the <head> section of your webpages. Mostly standard stuff, links to CSS code and RSS feeds, metadata for generating those previews you see when you share a link on social media and so on. There’s a lot of different things you can put here.
One kind of tag you can add indicates the physical, geographic location of your site. I don’t have that set. This site lives on a VPS , hosted, at the time of writing, by Linode/Akamai . I have no idea where it is physically. I don’t even remember which of their datacenters I selected when I set it up1. I don’t know where these words are. And of course I don’t know where the readers are, be they human or bot.
For a moment I was thinking about this as a piece of the wonder that the idea of the internet used to have. Of a realm of pure information and thought, abstracted away from the limitations of the physical world, that idea that it doesn’t matter where I am and it doesn’t matter where you are, we can connect all the same. But that’s not actually new, when you think about it. That’s the oldest and most basic power of writing.
I can write something in a newspaper or a book or a scroll or a clay tablet and it can carry my words who knows where. Who knows when, either. I like to read a bit of history every now and then, and when I do there’s always a part of me marvelling that here in front of me are the thoughts of someone hundreds or thousands of years old.
The internet is a refinement of the abilities of writing. It makes recording and moving words so seamless that you can have a conversation with someone via text as easily as if you were speaking with them. That is impressive. I am old enough to remember learning about emails as a child, and being amazed at the possibility of sending a letter across the country and having it arrive instantly, rather than with the delay of physical mail.
Back to geography and html now. There’s multiple ways you can put the coordinates of your site into the metadata of the page. One is normal: <meta name="geo.position" content="latitude;longitude">. It gets the job done, but it’s nothing to write a post about. Another option, apparently, is to label the data ICBM, as in ICBM address
. It’s a piece of dark whimsy amidst a lot of not quite formal but at least dry and technical tables. My reaction to that is why I’m writing this post in the first place.
I will not be setting up my personal coordinates on here (which I could, as opposed to the coordinates of the server, which I can’t), either for missiles or maps. I like my privacy2. I do feel a little sad about it, and I wish for a simpler, more innocent world where I could just post my address. I like getting real mail. That simpler world never existed, I know.
Where am I? What is my address? I’m here on Earth with you, at https://axxuy.xyz/blog .
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I could go through my records and look it up, obviously, but it’s harder and not as fun to philosophize about that. ↩︎
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I like the idea of privacy, at least. Real privacy is often largely an illusion on the internet, unfortunately. But I can at least make it take a little more work to gather all my data. ↩︎