This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Maoist Internationalist Movement

Web Page directories complaint

by Web Minister, March 27, 2004

We are having a disconnect in our web work still. I have updated the credo on our Web Minister web page in points 3 & 4, but the problem is more ideological than just any single technical problem. Recently I discovered a whole directory of material on the Philippines lost to the public from sloppy and illogical thinking. We need to get used to what its been saying in the PIRAO reports lately: mistakes or laziness can result in hundreds or thousands of people missing something, in a mere month's time. I'm quite sure most of us would not botch an appointment at a public meeting for a MIM speech with hundreds or thousands of audience members.

As recently as 2001 someone put some textfiles from news of the day in our home directory. Our objective is to reduce the number of items in the home directory, but once someone makes a mistake, it's very difficult to fix, because of the way web traffic works. It's very important to think logically. All topics that MIM and affiliated organizations can think of fit within existing file folders in etext.org/archive/etext/* There is no need for more folders or articles at that level. Do not create anymore. The only new ones will be for new languages or completely administrative purposes.

Though not as bad as putting a textfile in the home directory, this year we had development of a new folder for "elections." Reflecting the ongoing struggle in our circles, I think it's also typical that this folder ended up with a link on the home page. The whole folder and link could have been agitation. It could have been in MIM Notes special topics or it could have gone in contemporary topics of Maoism even.

We've had some ugly me-firstism in how people look at this web page work. We've had people tell us to move topics around to benefit some over others and I think it's a typical leadership mistake to want to falsely flatter people by giving everyone a "special" sense by putting their link on the home page or their article in the home directory even! It's pathetic, because it's not even accurate me-firstism, just a me-first assumption. So far in March two of the top three hit-getting articles--each getting more hits than the home page by the way--are both not just one directory level deep but four deep. That's why it's important not to think of web work as some kind of real estate battle between Zionists and Palestinians. It's all much more like running from speech to speech and missing audiences that show up, because the MIM speaker got stuck in the elevator.

When MIM gets stuck in the elevator it means that articles that should have been written or linked to are not there. MIM-readers are also getting stuck in the elevator when they do show up somewhere and the page fails or does not link to related pages.

Later today I'll be putting up a web page that someone in charge of a web page intended about six years ago. Somehow--and now I'm mostly to blame--"seize the time" never applied to this particular file and it never came to life as envisioned. I'm referring to our work on censorship at U.$. colleges.

No doubt some me-first line was responsible for a whole directory of stuff on the Philippines getting nuked. Instead of thinking about the website as a whole, people are doing their piece and not linking to or extending what is already there. One of the best things we can do to boost per reader pages read is link to other files from our files. We should be thinking about what people interested in the web page we are working on right now might also be interested in.

Another persistent problem is people swearing by the "What's New." The "What's New" page is not complete and does not have to be. Nonetheless, today, I discovered that it had been completely clipped arbitrarily at the bottom. Someone is using an editor with a buffer limit or overwriting the file when the etext hard drive is full. We have to check that the file size matches what it says in the directory. Just because a file uploads does not mean it has uploaded at the proper size.

Instead of being excited about "my" "special" web page or x-topic's special web page, let's be excited about building for what Zhang Chunqiao called the "all-round dictatorship of the proletariat"--defeating the bourgeoisie everywhere. The old Web Minister traffic reports and the PIRAO reports of today remind me of the cynicism people feel about an alleged quote from Stalin to the effect that a single death is a tragedy while a million is a statistic. In my opinion, if Stalin said it, the context meaning he had was on account of frustration with the people not paying attention to statistics regarding grain and steel production. Catching spies caught people's outrage in the USSR, but a grain statistic did not. For us communists when we see a grain statistic, we see starvation or not starvation. When we see steel statistics, we see the success or failure of a coming Nazi invasion in the USSR's case. Today, when we look at the web traffic for MIM's web page, we picture thousands of people becoming millions, the political abilities of which will determine whether the species survives the next hundred years or not. It's that simple.

People who want to boost the website traffic and the traffic for their articles should try to follow concrete examples, download files via FTP (and not right-clicking) to look at the .html and fix up old files. There is plenty to be gained from filling in what we already have and extending it within its own logic. We've been growing at a great pace for a long time and we could even accelerate.

People are clamouring that the MIM Web Ministry expand into new technological goodies. Yet some of the same people clamouring are also not updating their existing material. We have files with completely outdated information on them, dead-ends and broken links. Today I fixed some that had been there at least four years. There's a lot more.

We also have files that just don't work. Most of them I have attended to, but we still have more and these artificially boost per reader page statistics. That's not to mention that they frustrate readers.