How the blog broke the web (2017)
stackingthebricks.com
How the blog broke the web (2017)
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Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#2I have a client who's web site is a series of pages within folders, no database, no scripting, html pages only. It's a complete joy to work on. Problems are rare and easily resolved, I look forward to updating it. I can't help thinking more small and medium sized web sites should be setup like this.
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#3There's lots of tools around nowadays that allow you to build a site that doesn't conform to the blog format, but the old web hasn't really made a comeback. I think there is truth in the author's statement:
> Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it.
writing up whatever daily musing into a short-form article is much easier than carefully organizing and categorizing an entire library of work, so there will be more of that around. Writing a 140 character update on your social feed is even easier, so there will be more of that.
The old web hasn't totally disappeared, by the way. It's just much harder to find in a sea of other content that has grown much faster. And blogs are only a small part of that. SEO advertising clickbait spam sites are drowning out a lot of content on the web, because they are extremely low effort and there's money to be made in them.
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#4Reminds me of these (https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html) digital garden style personal websites.
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#5I have a client who's web site is a series of pages within folders, no database, no scripting, html pages only. It's a complete joy to work on. Problems are rare and easily resolved, I look forward to updating it. I can't help thinking more small and medium sized web sites should be setup like this.
This with added markdown support is basically how blot.im works and it’s what got me actually working on a site (albeit in blog ish format). Not affiliated just a happy customer.
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#6I wonder how much RSS/Atom has driven the chronological feed to become such a fundamental building block in website design.
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#7I have a client who's web site is a series of pages within folders, no database, no scripting, html pages only. It's a complete joy to work on. Problems are rare and easily resolved, I look forward to updating it. I can't help thinking more small and medium sized web sites should be setup like this.
This with added markdown support is basically how blot.im works and it’s what got me actually working on a site (albeit in blog ish format). Not affiliated just a happy customer.
One of my go-to projects when learning a new programming language: Build a markdown based blog with it. Usually quite simple and you learn a lot about a language doing that.
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#8This is interesting but I don't think it's what "broke the web". What really broke it is that those 20-30 million people who would have made hobbyist blogs or posted to forums are now part of the 200million (twitter) or 2 billion+ (FB) who just post on social media instead. Almost nobody is out there blogging about gardening just cause they like the topic, the new gardening content on the web is all SEO driven
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#9Reference sites still exist, Wikipedia isn't organized by reverse-chronological and MediaWiki is a far more formidable CMS than MT ever was.
Same goes for ReadTheDocs, Sphinx, Jekyll, Hugo, or any number of static site generators that power the infinite libraries of documentation, reference material, and personal sites on the web.
What the author is bemoaning is the loss of the eclectic, bespoke, personal-style of homepage that existed in the early web. These sites still exist of course, they're just a much smaller percentage of the content. What the author fails to consider is that this diminished position has nothing to do with the tools, and everything to do with the population of people who were coming online in the early 2000s.
The strangeness and lovable oddities of the early web were a function of the people who populated it. The generic, least common denominator status quo of the now is similarly defined because everyone is online, and so the content distribution reflects that.
Everyone's Eternal September comes at some point, for the author it was October 2001. Internet is full, AOL users go home.
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#10I have a client who's web site is a series of pages within folders, no database, no scripting, html pages only. It's a complete joy to work on. Problems are rare and easily resolved, I look forward to updating it. I can't help thinking more small and medium sized web sites should be setup like this.
I suppose things like a "design update", let alone "rebranding", never happen to this client?
Unless every page is entirely unique, a web site consisting of raw HTML pages has a lot of repetition / redundancy, and coordinated updates become repetitive, too. Authoring, too.
The upside, of course, is that there's literally nothing to go wrong in the pipeline, because there is none beside the upload operation.
I can imagine that sites like https://ciechanow.ski where every page appears custom-made could be managed like that.