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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)

#101

Post by AndrewStephens »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #95
AndrewStephens wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my opinion for a while as well. It depends on your audience but about 50% of hits to my site come from one mobile device or another and in the end I felt I had to put the effort in to support them.

What is this "audience" you speak of? I've run a blog for 25 years. First, it was FrontPage, then a custom PHP site, then a custom Rails app, and now Wordpress. The only thing that hits it is web crawlers. I do it because I must.

Ha! I run a simple hit tracker and most of my posts get single digit hits a year. I rent a server to run my blog and write a blog to have something for my server to do.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#102

Post by ryukafalz »

nickelpro wrote: post #9

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 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.

I think it does have something to do with the tools, but not in the way the author is describing.

Rather, the need for personal homepages was diminished because search engines replaced them! When I came online, around that time, I was introduced right away to search engines as the way to find things online.

This of course was always an incomplete replacement. Search engines provided a window into a much larger set of content than any one curated website, but they were more easily manipulated, so smaller and more niche content would be comparatively harder to discover. The popular sites, and the sites whose ranking was manipulated, rose to the top.

I've started to wonder lately if it would be beneficial to revive personal, curated homepages for this reason. They can't replace search engines entirely of course, but the breadth of information you can discover on rabbit holes from older sites is mind-boggling and I feel like there's something there.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#103

Post by rchaud »

azangru wrote: post #83

The article is internally inconsistent. Consider the following quotes: > The early web itself, of course, was pretty exclusive: first, you had to be online, then you had to know HTML, and that wasn’t enough, you also had to have a hosting account, and know how to use it. [1] > Culturally, though, it was devastating. Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages, but they were writing web content in for…

I find that lots of developers do not have a website. Many just have a Twitter and Github and that's it.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#104

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

> Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages, but they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page.

This is my fear with AI and other tools. Consuming more will not make us any better. The whole point of existence is alchemy: the art of changing as a person while doing something.

No matter how fast we can produce or consume, there will always be more of it and everything will have less meaning.

I remember those first blogs. They indeed had a personality and a quirkiness we have since lost from the internet.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#105

Post by AndrewStephens »

hardware2win wrote: post #94
AndrewStephens wrote: post #65

There 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 moni…

What is much much harder in using some css from bootstrap or css grid/flex that will handle it?

Everything.

Writing plain HTML used to be easy - if you could edit a text file you could slap in a few tags and be happy enough.

Having to learn CSS (there is nothing easy about grid/flex) just to get a good looking site is way more effort than most people want.

Hence the reliance on content managers/social media site that do this hard work for you, at the cost of personalization.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#106

Post by AndyNemmity »

There were way more than 23 blogs in 1999. I can't even imagine how you get to that number.

If blog means, updated page that moves in reverse chronological order. I would have called it a diary in 1999, but many of my friends from IRC had these.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#107

Post by Slava_Propanei »

mansoon wrote: post #32
orthoxerox wrote: post #29

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.

[dead]

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#108

Post by swyx »

> The potato gun girl and gerbil genetics guy found they didn’t want to write updates. It didn’t make sense. Their sites should have remained a table of contents, a reference tool, an odd and slightly musty personal library… the new “posts” format simply didn’t work for what they wanted to do. It felt demanding, and oppressive.

> But they’d already switched. They’d already spent all that time and energy and optimism. To switch back, they’d have to go through that process all over again. Only worse, of course, because they’d have to build the new (old) site completely from scratch. They had no tool to give it shape.

except there was. Wikipedia and other wikilike software. the start of this essay was very strong but ignoring the facts to push a point of view is a really poor end to an otherwise strong piece

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#109

Post by Ensorceled »

snarf21 wrote: post #87
Ensorceled wrote: post #68

What 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.

I would argue that all of those (and even more) reasons are the same reason. Ad tech driving the "free" web is the source of all the problems. Outrage (faux) is more profitable than journalism and information sharing.

That's hard to argue against, especially when targeting and tracking is taken into account.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#110

Post by jmbwell »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #104

> Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages, but they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page. This is my fear with AI and other tools. Consuming more will not make us any better. The whole point of existence is alchemy: the art of changing as a person while doing something. No matter how fast we can produce or consume, there will always be more of it and everything…

I was recently looking through WordPress themes. I remember some years ago, it was easy to find all kinds of quirky themes that were easy to quirk up even further.

Today, there are lots of well prepared themes, but they’re all fundamentally the same: designed to “monetize” “content” with the broadest possible “reach” for someone’s “brand,” in service to modern “creator” culture.

And just as you say, the more of it there is, the less any of it seems to mean.

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