Michael Bauser's Web Clichés

In early wanderings on the Web, I noticed a fair number of unnecessary fixtures cropping up on various web sites. Protestations of indvidualism to the contrary, geeks (like most people) run in packs, so early "web designers" tended to copy "good ideas" from each others' pages. After a while, some of those reoccurring themes became full-fledged clichés Almost everybody with a homepage has one (or more) of these clichés, but most of them don't really need them.

Not to be outdone, I resolved to add as many cliché pages as possible to www.bauser.com, just to be annoying. (I do a lot of things just to be annoying. That's probably why nobody evers comes to my parties.) Here's a list of all the clichéd pages I've added to this server, why I added them, and how they turned out.

Depending on your point of view, this page is either a guide to making your home pages look like those of web veteran, or a list of style crimes. (Maybe I should run a vote on that or something.)

Right from the beginning, Michael Bauser's PGP key was available through my home page, because it was the easiest cliché to install. Frankly, distributing PGP keys through the Web is inefficient, but if clichés aren't really about efficiency, are they?
The second cliché was significantly less technical. Michael Bauser's Compact Disc Collection was a cliché and a fake-out, since I didn't own a CD player when I created the page. Then my parents gave me a player for Christmas (I suppose they were tired of me being the last analog person in the family), the joke stopped being funny, and I killed the page. Still, I wasn't really to completely abandon the collection cliché, so I replaced it with a far geekier counterpart, Michael Bauser's RPG Collection.
To the best of my knowledge, there have been no major legal battles about plagarizing web content from random homepages, but that hasn't stopped a lot of mediocre writers from creating elaborate (and sometimes even legally enforcible) copyright statements for their web pages. Frankly, I'm disappointed that more people haven't accessed the Copyright Statement for the Michael Bauser Project -- I thought it was a reasonably funny bit of satire.
If you came online after 1990, it's only 50/50 that you even know what the finger(1) command is for. Yet WWW/finger interfaces were pretty common during the Web's Geek Age, so there's a finger michael@bauser.com page, complete with all the information that real geeks are supposed to put in their .plan file. According to my access_log (see below), a lot of people are accessing that page; I suspect a lot of them are just trying to figure out what the icon on the toolbar is for.
Another old geek cliché (fading into obscurity like the PGP cliché and the finger(1) cliché is Michael Bauser's Geek Code. I almost had to put my code on a web page, because it was just too big for my .signature file.
I actually delayed public announcment of my home page for 2 months, so I could learn enough about C to install a log analyzer, and get statistics from the beginning. (Actually, I installed 4 log analyzers at the time, to test them out.) Staring at my server statistics actually led me to some halfway interesting thoughts on WWW traffic patterns.
Everybody has friends, even argumentative bastards like me, and a lot of people seem compelled to list their names on web pages. The Friends of Michael Bauser Page desperately tries to rise above the cliché by annotating the list. At least that way, you'll have some idea why these people are my friends.
My homepage was part of the original EFF Blue Ribbon Protest, but it wasn't until I'd taken the ribbon off for several months that I realized Page With A Protest Ribbon was a verifiable cliché. To make up for that oversight, I'm putting the new ribbon right here, so the page about clichés can be a clichéd page, too.

Join the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign!
I originally depended on simple mailto links to handle reader feedback (in fact, the typical page at www.bauser.com has 2 such links), but I never got much mail through them. Then guestbooks started showing up all over the Web, and it looked like people responded to them, so I added a guestbook. I now get a lot more feedback about this site, but I get a lot less intelligible feedback -- guestbook users are almost universally semi-literate and/or deranged. I stopped reading my guestbook in 1997, and have removed most of the links to it.
Every home page needs a yard sale. I have some old toys and comics for sale, but that page is temporarily offline while I have the goods in deep storage. I'll probably just end up dumping them on eBay anyway.
Installing the search engine was actually quite painful because some of the behind-the-scenes technical stuff (mostly having to do with content-negotiation) confused the hell out of a lot of software. You know what? After weeks of grief getting it set up, nobody uses the damn thing. I may yet replace it with a link to HotBot.
I realized I may be the last person online who hasn't joined a webring, so I signed up my Ghostbusters Roleplaying Game Page for the Ghostbusters Webring. So far, it hasn't done a damn thing for my site's traffic, but it has convinced me there's one thing more annoying than newsgroup power struggles -- webring power struggles.