2/12/02

Run Your Own Website? 

Oh Angry Harry! What would be the point of me learning to run my own website? - or just one webpage!? After all, I do not have your wonderful gifts and talents for activism. I would be redundant. What is the point?

Have you learned nothing? Idiot!

Look.

Your local builder does a bad job and refuses to recompense you. You write an account of his miserable attitude that will make his eyes water. Perhaps you photograph his business premises. Perhaps you photograph his appalling work. You post it all up on your humble webpage - perhaps with an image of your bottom alongside one of his face.

"Have you also had trouble with this builder?" you ask your readers. "If so, contact me at this email address, and together - united! - we shall take him to task!"

ETC.

You alert him to it, and point out that while, at the moment, your readers are few, you can easily alert the whole neighbourhood to your webpage with simple leaflets containing your URL if he doesn't shape up. 

And you also remind him from somewhere therein that you can take all the time in the world. 

There is no rush.

"Have you had a problem with Smith & Jones builders? If so, log on to ????.com and see what problems I've had."

And you also point out to him that you can easily have 2,000 small leaflets printed for as little as $50!

Well, you get the picture.

Your humble webpage is suddenly a cluster bomb!

Just make sure that you say nothing that is untrue or clearly malicious. Apart from being illegal, it would, of course, be beneath you!

Got a problem with a local official or department of some kind? Too scared to set up your own webpage? Then set one up anonymously, perhaps hosted in another country. Perhaps even leave a message on an appropriate address-accessible forum that stores its messages online for some time. Describe your problem. Get leafleting, or emailing, without informing the official or the department, and see if any support from other victims comes through.

It may. It may not.

But it may!

About a year ago a website sprang up concerning the behaviour of two council officers in North London. The webmaster, Mr X - the victim of their bad behaviour - had apparently alerted much of his neighbourhood to his website by putting a few thousand leaflets through letterboxes. The leaflets were very polite. Both they and the website merely asked if anyone who had recent dealings with the offending department would help him in his case by furnishing him with any information that might be of value.

No malicious slander there!

The council took up and reviewed his case 'satisfactorily' within a week of the website being up.

And so he took it down!

And, of course, you could also use a website to further the men's movement! - you lazy good-for-nothing.

So, the next time that you are sitting on your fat behind in front of the screen tempted to spend all evening gawping wide-mouthed at naked women and reading bawdy jokes, put on some music instead, and figure out how to run a simple webpage. 

It is very easy to do.

And you will empower your miserable self most enormously!