e/n

e/n site

Refers to a web site, often made by an angst-ridden teenager, containing mostly ramblings about life's little foibles. Can also contain bad teen-age poetry. Known for gratuitous use of excessively dark or pale color schemes, and lowercase letters all over the place.

Most e/n sites are blog sites, with a lot of microcontent. Places like LiveJournal and Blogger let users make small updates easily, generating all the HTML and transferring the files automatically. LiveJournal even lets visitors leave comments on each entry, in a vaguely Slash-like way.

Most e/n sites are boring if not depressing; they make up a fair amount of the entries on losers.org. Very little of the content is actually of any interest to the outside world. In response to a Slashdot troll who was dogging a user about his e/n site, the user replied "My web site is not for you. It is for me." That was one of very few instances where a troll has been left speechless.

According to The Automatic E/N Web Site (http://www.conhugeco.org/en/), E/N can stand for "Eternal/Noise", "Everything/Nothing", "Endless/Nonsense", or something else.

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Update Jan 28 2004: In the years since I originally noded this, the term "e/n site" has been shunned by the public in favor of more specific terms like "blog" and "LiveJournal."

E/N originally meant "Entertainment/News", it was used to describe general catch-all sites that were designed around one specific person's taste. Everything/Nothing was a permutation of it describing the same type of site, because it covered everything, but nothing in particular. Famous E/N sites include Stileproject, and Something Awful (anyone know more obvious examples?)

You wouldn't necessarily call E2 an E/N site (unless you were trying to make a bad pun), because it's designed specifically to be a community. E/N sites are the dictate of one person or of a small group of people. The site revolves around this person/group's idea of what the ideal website would, in all circumstances, be. Lately, the term E/N has been applied to things like weblogs, or angsty online forum posts where people talk about their individual lives. In effect, E/N has come to mean content of personal interest to the author. In some cases, this content also interests a wide array of other people. In other cases, not.