Unmasked

I began blogging in March 2005. For exactly seven years I maintained an 'anonymity shtick', more specifically, I didn't specify my name or an email contact in the menu div in the upper-right-hand corner of my blog template; I noted that I lived in New Orleans and that was it.

In retrospect my use of an anonymity shtick was probably inspired by my view of album cover art; as someone who came of age prior to the 'death of vinyl', it occurred to me back in the day that the coolest album covers are those on which artists say as little about themselves as possible - think Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy or Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. I could relatedly say that anonymity added a bit of mystique to my otherwise thoroughly nerdly identity. (I am very much the nerd I would seem to be from my blog: what you see is what you get, folks.)

As regards writers who work in the Web coding field, anonymity is not at all uncommon. If you go through the lists of contributors at the bottom of Mozilla's JavaScript Guide and JavaScript Reference portals, you will see that almost all of those contributors use pseudonyms. HTML Goodies slinked into anonymity once founder Joe Burns cut his ties with the site. Neither the JavaScript Kit guys nor the DevGuru guys tell you who they are. So I was in pretty good company.

"But didn't you get bored with it after a while?" That I did. And I would have ditched my anonymity shtick a lot sooner were it not for my fear that I would get hit with an avalanche of spam were I to do so; thankfully that has not happened over the past year. (Now watch the spam roll in...)

The primary reason I ditched my anonymity shtick was that I wanted to 'raise my profile' as part of an inchoate plan to leverage my blog in an employment-related way - more on this in a future post. Besides the publicity and boredom factors, however, there was a little something extra that pushed me over the edge.

In mid-March 2012 - in Blog Entry #244 - I discussed an "Adding Rotating Images to Your Web Site" tutorial at the HTML Goodies site. The "Rotating Images" tutorial contains a small amount of layer element/object code even though layers have long been obsolete. (Actually, "obsolete" doesn't do the situation justice: layers are only supported by Netscape 4.x, and absolutely no one should be using Netscape 4.x in this day and age - the only people who should have Netscape 4.x on their computers are archivist types such as myself - it would be more accurate to say that layers are extinct.) This being the case, I felt that someone in charge at HTML Goodies should have stepped in and said to the tutorial author, "Dude, you need to get the layer code out of your article." But who would that someone be? The About HTML Goodies sector of HTML Goodies gives no information as to who is currently running the site.

Like other HTML Goodies tutorials, the "Rotating Images" tutorial is followed by a comment thread. HTML Goodies' comment threads are not moderated; the commenters on these threads are very much left to their own devices. The "Rotating Images" tutorial concerns animation, which is a classic JavaScript area, and the "Rotating Images" commenters were asking various animation-related questions but not getting any answers, and as I was reading through the comment thread I thought, "The HTML Goodies 'management' should be responding to at least some of these people." But again, HTML Goodies is silent on who makes up that management.

And all of a sudden anonymity didn't seem so cool, hip, or edgy, but rather unfocused, chaotic, and even incompetent to an extent: "Can't we do better than this?" And so shortly after finishing work on Blog Entry #244 I added my name and an email contact to the aforementioned menu div.

Of course, if there were anything controversial about what I do, then someone would have taken the trouble to 'out' me long ago, but there isn't (Henry Kissinger's academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small dictum notwithstanding).

Getting back to writers who work in the Web coding field, the folks at the top of the food chain - the technologists who craft specifications for the W3C - do tell you who they are. I'm not in their league, but that doesn't mean I can't aspire to be in their league.

So here's to transparency, here's to accountability, here's to setting the bar high: here's to the end of anonymity.