The Art of Sustaining a Still Popular Website in an Age of Social Media

Paul-Newell Reaves
MA, English
George Washington University, 2016
owner, co-editor, Defenestrationism.net


Part 1.) the Broader Outlook at Defenestrationism.net

Remember?— we used to surf the internet.  Course, that was almost a quarter-century ago.

Then?– blogging happened. Blogs: the internet graveyard.

Between posting Social Media, scanning through Social Media, even occasionally reading Social Media, and certainly, always, unendingly, checking for new Social Media, no one has much use for the rest of the internet, at all.  Now?— we scroll past the internet.

But at its dawn?— we would cruise. Cruising internet chatrooms I remember from 6th-grade, hoping for someone, or thing, that wasn’t pretending to be someone, or thing, that she, he, they or it, was not.  An anecdote: one character would cruise the chatrooms, posing as other than she, he, they, it was, only to reveal her, his, their identity with “I put on my wizard’s hat and robe and cast a level 6 spell on you.”  Cruise on.

We do not surf through the internet, we do not blog on the internet; we stream from the internet, we post to the internet, we download off the internet, we often regret after using the internet, we continue existing long past deletion in the dark-web under the internet.  !What marvelous prepositions our internet usage– across more than a quarter-century— employs!

On subject of internet grammar, here’s some internet punctuation: I hit a spacebar after typing a web address.  An example: Defenestrationism.net .

[Dot]org : An organization.  [Dot]com : Commerce.  [Dot]net : You guessed rightly, a network.

At Defenestrationism.net , we are proud of our [dot]net status— to such an extent that though I own Defenestrationism.com , too, the [dot]com address only redirects to the [dot]net homepage.  We are a network: a network of authors, flash-fiction-eteers and poets– we employ contest judges and co-editors, we engage fan voters– a network, a network of all you lovers of literature.  We accept no donations, charge no submission fees, and refuse to add ads.  Perhaps such a code contributes to the sustainability of our continuing popularity, now 11 years deep.

When you Lovers of Literature surf through Defenestrationism.net , you will catch minor tidal waves— Complex Fairy Tales features 20 stories by 16 authors, from California to Cuba, Washington, D.C to the Arab Emirates. And it resulted in 5,430 site-visits from 1,006 unique IP addresses during its 12 week publication run in 2016. Add to that the 3,566 visits since then to the coalition of those 23 sub-domains. You will surf curl after curl of our twice annual fiction contests— six of both, with the seventh now underway.  But beware, you Lovers of Literature, you will also be plunged into the deepest trenches of Otherness which you barely imagined you could plummet: our Prisoner Narratives— with Jenean, “Kevin,” Rob and Sheriff Marty; our Disability Narratives— including Hacking Mobility: Able-bodied Prescripts of Mobile Games and How Gamers with Disabilities Cope, which deconstructs Pokémon Go; and our Homelessness Narratives— such as voice recordings of how Diana Paliotto “became known.”  This the code that keeps Defenestrationism.net popular, 11 years deep.


So keep surfing through as,
next week,
The Art of Sustaining a Still Popular Website 
continues with:
Part 2.) Display and Design at Defenestrationism.net 
only on— you guessed rightly, again—
Defenestrationism.net 
Defenestrationism.net
Defenestrationism.net
Defenestrationism.net .




on to part 2. of the Art of Sustaining a Still Popular Website in an Age of Social Media


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3 Responses to “The Art of Sustaining a Still Popular Website in an Age of Social Media”

  1. Defenestrationism.net » Blog Archive » The Art of Sustaining a Still Popular Website in an age of Social Media: Display and Design at Defenestrationism.net Says:

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