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.
One of my go-to projects when learning a new programming language: Build a markdown based blog with it. Usually quite simple and you learn a lot about a language doing that.
This is a thread focused on markdown and html based SSBs. If you would like to continue our political discussion, you are welcome to contact me on my website, where I occasionally write about related issues. But HN guidelines suggest this unrelated thread is not the place for such a conversation.
I suppose things like a "design update", let alone "rebranding", never happen to this client?
Unless every page is entirely unique, a web site consisting of raw HTML pages has a lot of repetition / redundancy, and coordinated updates become repetitive, too. Authoring, too.
The upside, of course, is that there's literally nothing to go wrong in the pipeline, because there is none beside the upload operation.
I can imagine that sites like https://ciechanow.ski where every page appears custom-made could be managed like that.
I can't help thinking more small and medium sized web sites should be setup like this.
I don't. Website updates are mostly changes to the content once it's gone live, and that shouldn't require a developer. Having a CMS in the backend and a process to rebuild a static website from the content when it's changed lowers the cost of keeping things up to date, and improves the web by making websites stay relevant.
What the code looks like when a dev is working on it, or when it's sitting in a repo, it's mostly irrelevant. The important things are that the site owner can keep the content accurate and up to date, and the HTML and CSS that's delivered to the users is high quality and efficient.
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.
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 library of work, so there will be more of that around. Writing a 140 character update on your social feed is even easier, so there will be more of that.
The old web hasn't totally disappeared, by the way. It's just much harder to find in a sea of other content that has grown much faster. And blogs are only a small part of that. SEO advertising clickbait spam sites are drowning out a lot of content on the web, because they are extremely low effort and there's money to be made in them.
I think of https://wiki.c2.com/ where pages are organized like a graph, but within a page you might see a thread of paragraphs from people replying to each other. That's an interesting mashup of the two ideas.
I don't think even at its peak RSS alone was popular enough to the average user but it did popularize the whole "get a bunch of sources and aggregate updates into one stream" idea, and that's essentially what both facebook and twitter is.
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
> 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
The reality is almost everyone posting on social media about gardening is doing so because they like the topic. The purely market-driven "influencers" are a minority, although they seem otherwise because they're the ones most aggressively tuning their content for the algorithms. And even then, people who make money from their content can also care about what they're doing.
Yeah that's the distinction I was making--the hobbyists have gone to social media, and the people registering domains and using a self-hosted CMS are trying to make a biz out of it
Although Substack seems to be causing a little renaissance of hobbyist blogging
The ones who actually made hobbyist blogs probably went to youtube because a youtube channel is actually much better than a blog from the pov of the hobbyist.
Of course it's harder to search video than a blog from the pov of someone looking for information but that's not the hobbyists problem.
Optimized for SEO driven possibly, but the question is, is it still useful?
The web still has all kinds of niche content, it just takes a bit of time to find it. Publishing content has diverged a great deal since 1993 and if someone is passionate about a topic, they will share it in a format they like. It might not be a classic blog post, but what matters in the end?
It was the first step. I was there. I first transitioned from totally customized, handmade websites to blogs. And then, from there to social media. The reason was always the same: convenience, as the author explains. Social media were a continuation of what the likes of Movable Type started.
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.
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 homepage that existed in the early web. These sites still exist of course, they're just a much smaller percentage of the content. 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.
The strangeness and lovable oddities of the early web were a function of the people who populated it. The generic, least common denominator status quo of the now is similarly defined because everyone is online, and so the content distribution reflects that.
Everyone's Eternal September comes at some point, for the author it was October 2001. Internet is full, AOL users go home.
> 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, unsolved mysteries of Ancient Mediterranean literature, their train trip from Europe to North Korea or the CUBIC NATURE OF TIME), wrote everything they wanted to say and mostly stopped.
They didn't enter into a parasocial relationship with millions of people, they didn't try to get rich by producing content, they didn't become slaves to The Algorithm, they didn't ruin the brilliance of their first LPs by producing a dozen more.
Once you look closely enough, the distinction collapses.
I used to think otherwise, but that was largely based on a refusal to look, knowing that if I did, the perceived reality would fall apart, and the naked nothing would be revealed.
But with respect to the shared net. The experience that makes a dent in the fabric of reality as shared or known by all, personalizes the universe to a subdomain.
For sure, but I think the confusion here is that that's more or less the opposite of how most people use it.
Like for me, the way I experience parasocial relationships most vividly is in educational YouTubers with a particular niche. I'll binge their videos and then they become emblematic of that domain of knowledge to me. And I'll have little imagined chats with them when I have ideas about that domain, where they generally take the opposite side of a view I might be developing and debate me. But really this is just the voice I've always talked to in my head wearing a mask, I don't know who these people are.
To borrow your analogy, they're sending unicast datagrams, and I'm sending TCP to their same address, but there's a firewall rule remapping it to localhost.
If the words come to you, I'm still listening, but there's 0 Pascals of pressure.
Call me crazy, but bear in mind I love a lot of modern web development marvels (no more tables everywhere) but I kind of miss when a lot of websites copied each other, and they had... tables everywhere, but the reason I miss it was because navigation was insanely consistent! It was also insanely easy to figure out.
One old as heck website that comes to mind for me is 1337.net which I think is more early to mid 2000s I'm not sure if it went back further or not. It's a joke site with l33t speak and what have you, but the fact it's still around is pure entertainment. They have not touched anything about it. I don't even think it has ads? Kudos for keeping it like the Spacejam website.
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 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.
> 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 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.
Yeah people forget that we went from an internet where ANYTHING you wanted, if it was there, would be on a university site or some personal site by someone slightly obsessed with the topic (otherwise why would they have build a website about it by hand or in Dreamweaver and bothers to host it?) - Wikipedia didn’t exist so even relatively simple searches would bring up these little almost “fan” sites.
This was the era of massive FAQ posts that were just becoming webpages in some cars - an example being the Doom FAQ: that would never be written as a single document today. (Even the modern linked copies are “new”: https://www.gamers.org/docs/FAQ/doomfaq/index.html ).
A game like Factorio or Dwarf Fortress certainly has similar or greater depth; but a single massive ascii text file will never be written for them, as there are more modern ways to transmit the information
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."
There are absolutely more, but relatively fewer, and you come across them less. They stopped being a well-known role model for how to put content out on the web.
I think ease of use is part of it, but in my opinion there's also something else: reach. Sure, you could spend a week or two coding your own personal website... but how many people are going to actually see it? A lot of people don't leave their social media walled gardens nowadays. A tweet has a much higher chance of actually being seen by people with much less hassle.
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, good luck finding it now since you just hopped off Google!).
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.
> 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.
I see quite a few posts on HN that are nostalgic about the early web. But I would say that there's an interesting take here about the shift to a preference for newer content. No doubt SEO has a lot tondo with it.
“Broke the Web”? I really dislike headlines like these. Movable Type and blogs didn’t “break” the Web - not now or back then either. Blogging and the blog layout was just one emergent trend of this era. Flashed based sites were another trend that emerged alongside blogs. Folks were still hand coding HTML and FTPing the files to a server. Directory/brochure style sites didn’t go anywhere. Through all these trends the Web has always been there like a good friend. Nothing “broke” it and nothing will for the foreseeable future.
Why are negative trends so often portrayed as inevitable? Why not create or at least point to some examples of the kind of website you like?
Maybe it's more appealing? No responsibility. No need to question your ideas: Do I really want a blog or a non-chronological website? Of course, you're going to have a blog, everything else is already "broken".
Liked the article but my feeling is that, at the end of the day, nobody cares about the tools you choose. People are only interested in the end results.
There's nothing preventing you from building your site out of manually crafted HTML pages (I do for instance) and I would even dare to say that it has never been easier to do so (things like Emmet make it really easier to produce HTML content from your text editor of choice, services like cloudflare pages or vercel take less than a minute to go from local to public).
CMS made it easier indeed for not-so-technical-savvy folks to push stuff on the WWW but is it actually a bad thing? At the end of the day, it's the content that matters in my opinion.
You can't go home again. I think an argument could be made that tools like Moveable Type and Blogger and Wordpress made the web. And, another argument could probably be made that seo-chum "articles" like this (and ad networks) broke the web. But, really Twitter and FB and YouTube are probably the most likely killers.
Despite the somewhat clickbaity title, which I didn’t mind so much, the salient point is near the bottom, about Chronos. This is always worth being aware of and on guard against. The are other, richer models available.
I loved the insight of how the chronological method of organization took over the zeitgeist of the early Internet, pushing out the handcrafted lists/hierarchies into weird niches in the sidelines, and eventually leading to it being superseded by the algorithmic-sorting that dominates the web today.
It is not that we can't make a non-chronological (or non algorithmic-sorting) website now a days, we obviously can as there are many comments here listing various CMSs. But it is about how the vast majority of people don't do feel inclined to participate on the non-chrono/non-algo internet (either because they don't like it or don't know it). For them to put something out there in the internet is synonymous to put it on a chrono/algo format.
If you want to blog away with simply editing HTML pages, but have no time for coming up with a template, or spend time with databases or static page generators, there's Zonelets https://zonelets.net/
In a more short-hand summary: When money creeps into art or intellectual pursuits that originated from personal interest, they usually race to the bottom.
There's nothing wrong with blogs. There is a lot wrong with the internet as an advertising machine. Heck, the comments here frequently are first-hand blog entries on a subject and I enjoy it very much. Now if it was monetized, I'm not sure if the signal to noise would be as equivalent.
This article seems like the author's personal memories asserted to sound like a comprehensive history. However, as someone online since 1993, with my own domain since 1995, I have different memories.
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.
So this is one of probably tens of thousands of websites (and I mean just with this overpriced provider-tool, many more people roll with more customized stuff) that are librarian-like but generated with an user-friendly tool:
It takes some digging to agree with the headline, but it feels true at some level.
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...
I think what the author is missing is that for a long time most of the social and "chronologically updated" part of the internet was done outside of the Web and on different protocols, mainly NNTP and IRC.
Blogs didn’t break the web, rampant advertising and social networks did.
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…
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.
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 digital garden: a website where most likely you have to write your RSS updates by hand. Not the literal XML but you will have to keep a changelog, because the cool stuff is outside the blog section. See also: https://journal.miso.town/
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.
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.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadAgain, I don't like taking sides. Just searching for absolute truth. We will never get there, but we can try.
ref to your comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34019912
Unless every page is entirely unique, a web site consisting of raw HTML pages has a lot of repetition / redundancy, and coordinated updates become repetitive, too. Authoring, too.
The upside, of course, is that there's literally nothing to go wrong in the pipeline, because there is none beside the upload operation.
I can imagine that sites like https://ciechanow.ski where every page appears custom-made could be managed like that.
I don't. Website updates are mostly changes to the content once it's gone live, and that shouldn't require a developer. Having a CMS in the backend and a process to rebuild a static website from the content when it's changed lowers the cost of keeping things up to date, and improves the web by making websites stay relevant.
What the code looks like when a dev is working on it, or when it's sitting in a repo, it's mostly irrelevant. The important things are that the site owner can keep the content accurate and up to date, and the HTML and CSS that's delivered to the users is high quality and efficient.
> 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 library of work, so there will be more of that around. Writing a 140 character update on your social feed is even easier, so there will be more of that.
The old web hasn't totally disappeared, by the way. It's just much harder to find in a sea of other content that has grown much faster. And blogs are only a small part of that. SEO advertising clickbait spam sites are drowning out a lot of content on the web, because they are extremely low effort and there's money to be made in them.
> When something is easy, more people will do it.
I'm sure there are way more quirky, personal and lovely websites out there than 20 years ago. There's just orders of magnitude more other content.
The whole article has a vibe of "old man yelling at clouds".
I don't think even at its peak RSS alone was popular enough to the average user but it did popularize the whole "get a bunch of sources and aggregate updates into one stream" idea, and that's essentially what both facebook and twitter is.
The reality is almost everyone posting on social media about gardening is doing so because they like the topic. The purely market-driven "influencers" are a minority, although they seem otherwise because they're the ones most aggressively tuning their content for the algorithms. And even then, people who make money from their content can also care about what they're doing.
Although Substack seems to be causing a little renaissance of hobbyist blogging
Of course it's harder to search video than a blog from the pov of someone looking for information but that's not the hobbyists problem.
https://codesupply.co/gardening-blogs/
Optimized for SEO driven possibly, but the question is, is it still useful?
The web still has all kinds of niche content, it just takes a bit of time to find it. Publishing content has diverged a great deal since 1993 and if someone is passionate about a topic, they will share it in a format they like. It might not be a classic blog post, but what matters in the end?
The web is not broken IMHO.
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.
And, with video form it's even harder to separate the signal from the noise.
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 homepage that existed in the early web. These sites still exist of course, they're just a much smaller percentage of the content. 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.
The strangeness and lovable oddities of the early web were a function of the people who populated it. The generic, least common denominator status quo of the now is similarly defined because everyone is online, and so the content distribution reflects that.
Everyone's Eternal September comes at some point, for the author it was October 2001. Internet is full, AOL users go home.
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, unsolved mysteries of Ancient Mediterranean literature, their train trip from Europe to North Korea or the CUBIC NATURE OF TIME), wrote everything they wanted to say and mostly stopped.
They didn't enter into a parasocial relationship with millions of people, they didn't try to get rich by producing content, they didn't become slaves to The Algorithm, they didn't ruin the brilliance of their first LPs by producing a dozen more.
(joking, but the point is that non-para-social relationships, "real" ones, exist and can usefully be distinguished)
Once you look closely enough, the distinction collapses.
I used to think otherwise, but that was largely based on a refusal to look, knowing that if I did, the perceived reality would fall apart, and the naked nothing would be revealed.
TCP.
But with respect to the shared net. The experience that makes a dent in the fabric of reality as shared or known by all, personalizes the universe to a subdomain.
Once I had the words. Now that’s gone too.
Like for me, the way I experience parasocial relationships most vividly is in educational YouTubers with a particular niche. I'll binge their videos and then they become emblematic of that domain of knowledge to me. And I'll have little imagined chats with them when I have ideas about that domain, where they generally take the opposite side of a view I might be developing and debate me. But really this is just the voice I've always talked to in my head wearing a mask, I don't know who these people are.
To borrow your analogy, they're sending unicast datagrams, and I'm sending TCP to their same address, but there's a firewall rule remapping it to localhost.
If the words come to you, I'm still listening, but there's 0 Pascals of pressure.
If you're a solipsist, it doesn't matter, but then nothing does.
I once believed in real relationships.
They’re just ideas running through meat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
Is that a misspelling or is there something called "ratheism"?
One old as heck website that comes to mind for me is 1337.net which I think is more early to mid 2000s I'm not sure if it went back further or not. It's a joke site with l33t speak and what have you, but the fact it's still around is pure entertainment. They have not touched anything about it. I don't even think it has ads? Kudos for keeping it like the Spacejam website.
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.
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.
This was the era of massive FAQ posts that were just becoming webpages in some cars - an example being the Doom FAQ: that would never be written as a single document today. (Even the modern linked copies are “new”: https://www.gamers.org/docs/FAQ/doomfaq/index.html ).
A game like Factorio or Dwarf Fortress certainly has similar or greater depth; but a single massive ascii text file will never be written for them, as there are more modern ways to transmit the information
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."
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.
Maybe it's more appealing? No responsibility. No need to question your ideas: Do I really want a blog or a non-chronological website? Of course, you're going to have a blog, everything else is already "broken".
There's nothing preventing you from building your site out of manually crafted HTML pages (I do for instance) and I would even dare to say that it has never been easier to do so (things like Emmet make it really easier to produce HTML content from your text editor of choice, services like cloudflare pages or vercel take less than a minute to go from local to public).
CMS made it easier indeed for not-so-technical-savvy folks to push stuff on the WWW but is it actually a bad thing? At the end of the day, it's the content that matters in my opinion.
It is not that we can't make a non-chronological (or non algorithmic-sorting) website now a days, we obviously can as there are many comments here listing various CMSs. But it is about how the vast majority of people don't do feel inclined to participate on the non-chrono/non-algo internet (either because they don't like it or don't know it). For them to put something out there in the internet is synonymous to put it on a chrono/algo format.
There's nothing wrong with blogs. There is a lot wrong with the internet as an advertising machine. Heck, the comments here frequently are first-hand blog entries on a subject and I enjoy it very much. Now if it was monetized, I'm not sure if the signal to noise would be as equivalent.
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.
https://publish.obsidian.md/zero-chroma-infinity/
We’re here, man.
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.
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...
As a hobby, it _IS_ cozy as hell.
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…
- 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 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/
The most frequently updated page is the list of books I've read.
Do you have a "digital garden" site?
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 digital garden: a website where most likely you have to write your RSS updates by hand. Not the literal XML but you will have to keep a changelog, because the cool stuff is outside the blog section. See also: https://journal.miso.town/
https://joeldare.com/how-i-use-github-as-my-blogging-platfor...
https://joeldare.com
https://neat.joeldare.com