About A Contemporary Nietzsche Reader

After a decade of Nietzsche's Features - yes, it's been online for 10 years by now - and after careful re-examinations and reconsiderations, I have decided to break away from the way things usually happen on the web, or at least, how they have started out.

In the beginning, when the web was all new to all of us, we came up with all these great ideas to make texts available online. But we didn't realise we were stuck in the text paradigm, that may work very well for books, that is after all where it came from, but in hindsight I think it doesn't work at all online. It is ridiculous to expect somebody to read a 200 Kb text file in their browser. Or even remember where they were if they come back to it a day or so later. 

In the special case of Nietzsche, one has to respect his own guidance of how he thought his works should be read. He mentions it on numerous occasions in several of his works. So in an effort to comply with that, and because it simply is a better system I have decided to launch this new site. The Nietzsche catalog will over time be added to a database, and from that database you can pick any Aphorism (or section).

We will still provide ways to have some context and even to read the works in chronological order, as if they were a book. By cutting things up in smaller pieces, it will be a lot easier to digest, which is a requirement for Nietzsche anyway, and it will be a lot more interesting to discover new things as well.

If you register on this site - which is free and no strings attached - there will be several extras like using your own favorites list and you can even compile your own notes. Those will all be available on your personal profile page here. By default these are all private, meaning only available to you. If you want to you can make them public. Just be aware that in that case they will be picked up by search engines and the likes too. So you might want to think twice before you hit the "public" button. 

To make registration as easy as possible we implemented an OpenID login system, which in essence means you don't even have to register or remember another password, just login with any OpenID account, whether that is your google account or blogger, yahoo, wordpress or facebook or twitter account... whichever you prefer or feel more comfortable with. OpenID logins are handled by a specialized provider, so your details are safe, we do not in any way get any access to any of your personal information, leave alone your password.  

Several things on this site are still under construction, some of the user interface items are not quite finished yet.

Search now works, using Google Custom search. Might need some finetuning.

REQUIREMENTS: This site requires a modern browser that is HTML5 ready, that would mean, the latest versions of Opera, Firefox, Chrome and Safari would work fine. For security reasons I can not recommend IE (Internet Explorer). Javascript is required for this site to function correctly, so make sure it is on in your browser. If you're using any noscript plugins, allow javascript for this site. The NOTEPAD button requires a browser that understands persistent storage, a feature of HTML5. It won't work on iphone or ipad or older browsers.

This site will grow organically, slowly, with new quotes added on a daily basis, until somewhere in a distant future it might one day be complete.

It allows you to read Nietzsche like Nietzsche wanted to be read, slowly, and one aphorism at the time.

Enjoy

Holtof Donné

February 18th 2011