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How the blog broke the web (2017)

stackingthebricks.com

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Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#11

Post by onion2k »

kerrsclyde wrote: post #2

I 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 can't help thinking more small and medium sized web sites should be setup like this.

I don't. Website updates are mostly changes to the content once it's gone live, and that shouldn't require a developer. Having a CMS in the backend and a process to rebuild a static website from the content when it's changed lowers the cost of keeping things up to date, and improves the web by making websites stay relevant.

What the code looks like when a dev is working on it, or when it's sitting in a repo, it's mostly irrelevant. The important things are that the site owner can keep the content accurate and up to date, and the HTML and CSS that's delivered to the users is high quality and efficient.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#12

Post by gnz11 »

“Broke the Web”? I really dislike headlines like these. Movable Type and blogs didn’t “break” the Web - not now or back then either. Blogging and the blog layout was just one emergent trend of this era. Flashed based sites were another trend that emerged alongside blogs. Folks were still hand coding HTML and FTPing the files to a server. Directory/brochure style sites didn’t go anywhere. Through all these trends the Web has always been there like a good friend. Nothing “broke” it and nothing will for the foreseeable future.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#13

Post by krapp »

firasd wrote: post #8

This 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

> 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

The reality is almost everyone posting on social media about gardening is doing so because they like the topic. The purely market-driven "influencers" are a minority, although they seem otherwise because they're the ones most aggressively tuning their content for the algorithms. And even then, people who make money from their content can also care about what they're doing.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#15

Post by ilyt »

kerrsclyde wrote: post #2

I 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.

Static page generator seems like ideal for that kind of stuff. Just enough to not copy-paste same stuff on different pages but not enough to get complex.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#16

Post by ilyt »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #6

I wonder how much RSS/Atom has driven the chronological feed to become such a fundamental building block in website design.

RSS ? Not really. RSS aggregators however...

I don't think even at its peak RSS alone was popular enough to the average user but it did popularize the whole "get a bunch of sources and aggregate updates into one stream" idea, and that's essentially what both facebook and twitter is.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#17

Post by planb »

sushibowl wrote: post #3

There'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 l…

I think what really happened is revealed when you just change 2 words:

> When something is easy, more people will do it.

I'm sure there are way more quirky, personal and lovely websites out there than 20 years ago. There's just orders of magnitude more other content.

The whole article has a vibe of "old man yelling at clouds".

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#18

Post by firasd »

krapp wrote: post #13
firasd wrote: post #8

This 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

> 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 The reality is almost everyone posting on social media about gardening is doing so because they like the topic. The purely market-driven "influencers" are a minority, although they seem otherwise because they're the ones most aggressively tuning their content for the algorithms.…

Yeah that's the distinction I was making--the hobbyists have gone to social media, and the people registering domains and using a self-hosted CMS are trying to make a biz out of it

Although Substack seems to be causing a little renaissance of hobbyist blogging

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#19

Post by dageshi »

firasd wrote: post #8

This 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

The ones who actually made hobbyist blogs probably went to youtube because a youtube channel is actually much better than a blog from the pov of the hobbyist.

Of course it's harder to search video than a blog from the pov of someone looking for information but that's not the hobbyists problem.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#20

Post by amadeuspagel »

Why are negative trends so often portrayed as inevitable? Why not create or at least point to some examples of the kind of website you like?

Maybe it's more appealing? No responsibility. No need to question your ideas: Do I really want a blog or a non-chronological website? Of course, you're going to have a blog, everything else is already "broken".

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