41–50 of 120 posts
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
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.
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.
As a hobby, it _IS_ cozy as hell.
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
Plus those with something more in-depth to say now tend to do it in video form.
And, with video form it's even harder to separate the signal from the noise.
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…
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…
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 personal experience, obviously there exists a population that moved away from hand-crafted HTML to blogs and social media, but that movement is trivial compared innumerable, inconceivable, content dilution of the net that happened over the course of the 2000s.
Most people on social media would never have created those hand-crafted sites to begin with, they weren't members of that self-selected group of early web pioneers. They were only ever going to engage with easy to use systems. We didn't miss out on a similarly sized web of artisanal websites, that future was never in the cards.
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 disguised my personal Wiki as a blog, but it’s been going on for over 20 years now and I suspect many people would do the same if they weren’t distracted off writing and sharing content by get rich quick schemes and the evolution of dopamine hooks like TikTok…
- 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 slightly dusty, delightful corners.
This is why I appreciate what https://neocities.org/ is doing, a lot. Every single one of those websites featured in the home page is not only nostalgic, but a treasure trove that someone manually collected and organised. It is ironic and sad that as technology improved, we lost Frontpage, manually written HTML and the soul in personal websites, now many are just stock Jekyll templates hosted on a github.io domain.
As someone that has struggled to blog all my career, I wonder if organising my thoughts cleanly into a polished but fleeting article just doesn't fit my way of thinking, and I would be better served by a personal website just about stuff I care about, which I keep updated over the years, and might go a bit dusty over time. Not a shop window, not a magazine, but an open garage full of thingamajigs collected over the years.
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More written words on digital gardens:
- https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden
- https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/