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How the blog broke the web (2017)

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Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#91
post #50

Some 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 love 100 Rabbits. Their web format inspired my NeatCSS framework.

https://neat.joeldare.com

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#92
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not yet, but I've been hacking on Kirby to create a regular blog-style personal website and I just want to throw everything out and have a way to host pure Markdown. Someone recommended PicoCMS elsewhere. That's my weekend sorted. You are one step away from a garden. Move those links out of "KB" and collect them in the home page. RSS is a bit harder to do on that type of websites. Here's my crappy definition of a dig…

Alright, I'll do a bit of reorganization today to ditch the "KB" thing. I'm considering scrapping the static site generator in favor of pure HTML, but... that bears careful thought.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#93
post #50

Some 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?

I think so…

https://joeldare.com

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#94

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?

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#95
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still see personal websites that are almost unreadable on small phones, for instance. My personal website is like that and I’ve made no effort to improve the phone experience. I really don’t care if phone users have access or not, on every other device it looks fine. It’s a personal website, if it looks good on my machine that’s enough for me.

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.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#96
post #71

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…

> I still see personal websites that are almost unreadable on small phones, for instance. My personal website is like that and I’ve made no effort to improve the phone experience. I really don’t care if phone users have access or not, on every other device it looks fine. It’s a personal website, if it looks good on my machine that’s enough for me.

I do a good bit of my web browsing on my phone and I hate those web sites that are "optimized for phones" and thus typically lacking content and features. You can sometimes disable them with desktop mode but usually those sites ignore that and force the "mobile site" version.

If the content is too small on a phone, you can always just zoom in and scroll horizontally as well as vertically. Unless the creator of the site decides to "helpfully" create a phone version of their site in which case you have to go find a computer to use the site or download some app. A great example of this is Reddit which goes out of its way to make their "mobile site" unusable to force people to download the Reddit app so they can more easily spy on you.

I do think web sites should scale properly to different window sizes which means not using certain formatting misfeatures that force certain elements to always appear on the screen or that make your menu unusable on a touch screen. That isn't hard to do because you have to make a deliberate bad design choice to make your site unusable on smaller resolutions. A well-designed web site will also work perfectly well on Lynx or a screen reader without any additional work.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#97
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not yet, but I've been hacking on Kirby to create a regular blog-style personal website and I just want to throw everything out and have a way to host pure Markdown. Someone recommended PicoCMS elsewhere. That's my weekend sorted. You are one step away from a garden. Move those links out of "KB" and collect them in the home page. RSS is a bit harder to do on that type of websites. Here's my crappy definition of a dig…

I have a draft where I talk a bit about hosting raw markdown on GitHub, which is how the draft is hosted. It’s been a draft since 2021, which I suppose is the way of the digital garden sometimes.

https://joeldare.com/how-i-use-github-as-my-blogging-platfor...

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#98
I created my first website in 1994, and started blogging (weekly, rather than daily) in 1995, so this was a nice walk down memory lane.

I too lament how much more difficult it is to build something completely independently than it was then, while rejoicing at how much more accessible building something is for more people, even if it means leaning on existing infrastructure.

Re: How the blog broke the web (2017)

#100
post #96
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still see personal websites that are almost unreadable on small phones, for instance. My personal website is like that and I’ve made no effort to improve the phone experience. I really don’t care if phone users have access or not, on every other device it looks fine. It’s a personal website, if it looks good on my machine that’s enough for me.

I do a good bit of my web browsing on my phone and I hate those web sites that are "optimized for phones" and thus typically lacking content and features. You can sometimes disable them with desktop mode but usually those sites ignore that and force the "mobile site" version. If the content is too small on a phone, you can always just zoom in and scroll horizontally as well as vertically. Unless the creator of the si…

On the other hand, I hate websites that are built phone-only, meaning, you have to retract a few meters from a screen, in order to read it somewhat comfortably. (Then, you've to go back to reach for the mouse and scroll, since the screen page is already over.) And it doesn't stop with the presentation: On a mobile device, three to four paragraphs is already an article, while on a screen it's the beginning of an abstract…

So there's always a mobile-only, a screen-only, a mobile-first, a screen-first and only rarely a general media web. It will depend on the author and the intended audiences.

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