I hadn’t heard of movable type before skimming that post but I would argue that a lot of web homogenisation nowadays is because of iPhones and iPads. In the early days, there were only computers so you knew that whoever was going to be interacting with your site was doing so through a keyboard and mouse and using a monitor. Now you don’t know if your user is interacting via a touch screen or mouse nor what size their screen is going to be. To fix this, people started gravitating towards certain ways of doing things to ensure a better user experience. You absolutely can make a weird old style blog, but getting it to look nice on an iPhone will likely be a pain in the arse so you either have to invest time in coding and testing it at different screen sizes or accept that the site is only going to be usable by desktop users. Everything is a tradeoff.
How the blog broke the web (2017)
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Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#62Reference 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…
Yeah, I agree, I think the "next" major 'Eternal September' if you will was around the 2010's give or take after Smartphones became far more common and everyone had insanely easy access to the web. A lot of web traffic is insanely on mobile, whereas before it was not, and it was a mess (remember those awful .mobi domains that you would be redirected to, BUT only the home page, so whatever content you wanted was gone,…
The 'Eternal September' was actually pretty early on--basically pre-Web to Web 1.0. I had a Unix workstation with a Mosaic homepage which basically had links to all the sites I found interesting. I agree that something happened with mobile/social. This post is more about the Read-Write Web (I think that was O'Reilly's term)/Web 2.0 era--which was between the two.
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#63Earlier 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…
I’m not fond of people who take ratheism as a major inteeest or even component of their identity, but pocm.info is just lovely.
> ratheism
Is that a misspelling or is there something called "ratheism"?
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#64I think a combination of chronological and topical organisation is best because each has their own audience.
Topics are great for visitors exploring your content for the first time and chronological updates are great for followers already familiar with your work.
This is the concept i’m exploring in my app, Kapa Notes. You write notes by topic and it generates timeline updates for you that you can edit as you like. I went with an outline based editor to reduce the friction of managing topics as much as possible.
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#65There are many suspects in the "who killed the web" mystery but blogs are low down on that list.
The real problem is that building a web page is much, much harder today than it was 25 years ago. Back then you could slap together some HTML, add a picture and an under-construction GIF and call it a day. Everyone with their huge 800x600 monitors would see the same thing.
Today you have to take into account not just monitors, but cell phones, and tablets of various resolutions and aspect ratios. And if you want something that looks as good as all the rest of the web you need fonts, fancy css, maybe some javascript controls.
And that doesn't even take into account that all this is a moving target. I still see personal websites that are almost unreadable on small phones, for instance.
I have a personal website and it has taken me years to get it looking the way I want. Every time I try something interesting (animation, javascript, etc) I have to test it widely.
People who just want to put up a website about their favorite trees don't want to do that.
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#66Some of my favourite "digital garden" websites: - http://100r.co/ - https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/home.html Made by the same people, but the second is more technical. I can't deny that there is a certain sense of visiting someone's home (in this case someone's sailboat ) that is completely absent in the modern, sterile and utilitarian blog format. It is a pleasure to get lost following interesting links, chancing upon…
I do this, too. My site https://benovermyer.com has a blog, but the more interesting stuff is all the _other_ pages.
The most frequently updated page is the list of books I've read.
Do you have a "digital garden" site?
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not fond of people who take ratheism as a major inteeest or even component of their identity, but pocm.info is just lovely.
> ratheism Is that a misspelling or is there something called "ratheism"?
I think they meant /r/atheism, the infamous subreddit?
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#68What really broke the web?
1. SEO click bait crap gumming up the works.
2. Walled gardens (there are many, but Facebook is the worst)
3. Rampant polarization driven by bad actors; governments (both local and foreign), political organizations, extremists, and corporations.
4. Ad tech siphoning off the value of the web and enabling the worst of the other issues.
Blogs wouldn't even make my top ten.
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I say in a sister thread, I transitioned from handmade websites to blogs as the author describes, and then from blogs to social media. The reason was also what the author describes: convenience. 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 describ…
> personal websites still exist, there are just fewer of them And my point is that this isn't true. There are more weird, wonderful, random single-purpose and eclectic websites today than ever before in the history of the Internet. It's just that they are suspended in an ocean of so much more Internet than existed before that they feel absent compared to the halcyon days. I'm not trying to invalidate anyone's persona…
It doesn't matter that there are objectively more if one sees them more rarely.
Like the saying goes, if it isn't on Google it doesn't exist. I use Kagi full time and I am delighted when an old style website is listed in the top 5. I always think "this would never appear in modern Google."
Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not fond of people who take ratheism as a major inteeest or even component of their identity, but pocm.info is just lovely.
> ratheism Is that a misspelling or is there something called "ratheism"?
That’s a particular social phenomenon, as linked to atheism as gospel music is Baptist churches.