31–40 of 120 posts
By 1996, we had AOL Hometown, Tripod, GeoCities, Angelfire, and more. All offering various forms of build tools and early CMS features.
The old weird web is still out there if you take the time to look. I would argue there are actually more quirky personal pages now than ever before.
Reference 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 ho…
> 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. When I stumble upon a Web 1.0 living fossil, it's a delight every time. Someone felt an overpowering need to say something, they made a website about their favorite topic (be that shoelace knots, unsolve…
https://publish.obsidian.md/zero-chroma-infinity/
We’re here, man.
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
BTW, I wouldn't blame Movable Type per se (I still have fond memories of that tool!) but rather the lack of tools to make the publishing of non-chronological content similarly easy. There was one attempt around 10 years ago: Opera Unite. It was a great idea (IMHO), but didn't last long.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. When I stumble upon a Web 1.0 living fossil, it's a delight every time. Someone felt an overpowering need to say something, they made a website about their favorite topic (be that shoelace knots, unsolve…
All relationships are parasocial.
One tech friend said it was bullshit. Who wants a guestbook you write into all by yourself?
I found this a hilarious explanation of what a blog is.
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.
Reference 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 ho…
> 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. When I stumble upon a Web 1.0 living fossil, it's a delight every time. Someone felt an overpowering need to say something, they made a website about their favorite topic (be that shoelace knots, unsolve…
Reference 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 ho…
I am the same person. I don't think I was more of a nerd when I wrote personal websites in 1998 than when I wrote blogs in 2002 or social media posts later. So I do think the tools have a lot to do with the changes described in the post.
It is true that non-chronological CMSs exist today, and they may be formidable in many respects, but I don't think they're better than MT in terms of ease of use. And also, the competition has gotten easier and easier: MT was just the beginning, now the real "trap" (as the author of the post would describe it) is social networks. The site generators you mention don't remotely compete in ease of use with social networks.
The only attempt I have seen of making publication of "permanent", non-timestamped content as easy as that of chronological content was Opera Unite. It didn't last for long.
Obviously the title and text are hyperbolic (personal websites still exist, there are just fewer of them) but the gist of what it says rings true to me, and I'm not an Eternal September curmudgeon.
Clearly it is the walled social media gardens that really "broke the web" and in far more fundamental ways (as in: posts that are schematic (e.g. 140 chars), that are not accessible unless logged in, where discovery is platform/algorithmic driven and not user driven etc).
These platforms flurished because they made it very easy for people to participate. In the (hypothetical) absence of social media, blogs could be accused of making it (merely) easy to follow a particular pattern of content creation.
This is a little bit like accusing writers or composers of blindly following a genre instead of crafting their own. Yes all genres are inventions and it is important not to stiffle that creative process, but it is not reasonable to expect the majority to do that...