#94

Yeah, not contradicting any of this. I love them, and they are useful. But they’re not necessary if you just need to make a simple website and aren’t comfortable with even that level of command line/technicality etc.

3 Likes
#95

I’ve done websites without any generators, and I know people without big tech skills who made simple html websites as well.

I think it’s a bit sad that all these fancy UI and tools made people scared of command line terminals :frowning: It’s really not that bad (for basic command line literacy), and it’s a window into what computer are. Same with things like html/markdown, the basics are simple but I still have people telling me “it’s scary because it’s programming”.

3 Likes
#96

fwiw, i made a small site for my wife recently. (clairecronin.com). hadn’t done anything like that for a while (and i’ve never been a big web developer) so spent a little time poking around. (didn’t want to run server-side stuff - definitely not PHP! good god - and didn’t want to require anything installed locally to make edits.)

not a blog, but a music site where it’s important for her to be able to easily add / change content without editing HTML.

in the end went really, really simple. (most complicated bit is the God Damn CSS, ended up with Tailwind. so that is a command-line element but it doesn’t change often.)

it’s just a dumb static site, but the content is Markdown and it’s rendered in the client. i feel a little bad about the inefficiency of this, but it means she can just go on Dreamhost and use the GUI to make content edits painlessly.

this was extremely simple to set up. it could be fancier with RSS feed, but i really don’t know how much that matters as much as just having a digital calling card and a place to add publication history, shows, &c. it could just as easily be a “blog” with a smidge more javascript and a simple header format for entries, or something.

point being, most of the static site solutions i came across felt like the most tremendous overkill. (unless there was some serious need to be driven by arbitrary data.)

5 Likes
#97

Honestly, I seriously miss the LiveJournal days. I followed only people that I knew (or in a very few cases, people I got to know as friends of friends), no groups or anything like that.

It was just a chronological feed of writings by people I knew, all in one place so I didn’t have to remember 37 different URLs to check for updates. There was little to set up or maintain, and privacy was relatively easy to manage.

There was no algorithm to decide what we saw or didn’t, no attempts to increase “engagement” (ugh) or follow increasing numbers of people, and no ads – there were free accounts, and paid accounts that were well worthwhile if you wanted a few extra features.

Unfortunately they were basically killed off by a mass migration to Facebook, at the same time as they were sold to Russian owners who had very different ideas about privacy and freedom of expression (especially for LGBT users). And there’s the downside of its centralized nature.

5 Likes
#98

These may well have been the best days of the internet. My impression is that most of the Livejournal crowd migrated to Tumblr, but the Twitter-like interaction format (the endless chains of “reblogs”, very similar to retweets) remains a major turnoff, as also does their recent crackdown on NSFW content.

2 Likes
#99

I miss Tumblr. I’ve been looking for a simple way to host gifs, short videos and sound pieces. I’m tired of Soundcloud and Youtube. I know I’ll miss out on exposure, but my goals for all this don’t require exposure :slight_smile:

I’ve been looking at gatsby.js as a static site generator but would like to also look at Ghost before I commit to building a bunch of static site stuff.

I don’t think there’s an easy Tumblr replacement…it was unique. All the hosted platforms have some compromise or other…it’s frustrating.

1 Like
#100

RSS and browser bookmarks still work fine for me :slight_smile:

Jokes apart, I’m totally convinced that one key factor to avoiding an internet rules by few monopolies is to abandon the idea that things need to be easy and convenient. That’s how they usually get us.

Also a free internet will only work if it’s decentralized and the intercomunication protocols (possibly not too many of them) are not owned by a private corporation.

For example, Google Calendar vs. using whatever calendar you want and syncing it with CalDAV. Dropbox vs. Nextcloud, etc.
Which takes me to another principle I have to come to believe in a lot lately: use as little tech as possible to solve a problem. If the tech does not everything you want, maybe you want too much, or maybe you’re just one little workaround from making it work.
As an example, one could try and solve the problem of task management with a heavy artillery solution like Asana or Trello, or one can just use CalDAV, or do everything with markdown or todo.txt and whatever cloud solution one already has.

The same probably applies to blogging. Less is more.

9 Likes
#101

Somehow I never tried an RSS reader. I didn’t really know what RSS even was for an embarassingly long time :slight_smile:

Even so, it’s a bit less comprehensive than something with an account system.

That’s a good observation, and I think it’s true of much more than the internet. Convenience puts a lot of bad food in our bodies and waste in our landfills.

2 Likes
#102

I don’t think I understand what you mean by “comprehensive” here?

#103

It is 2019 and I am still very much on the RSS bus. Which was, of course, the connective tissue, and worked really well until the death of Google Reader, which for many people killed RSS with no obvious (hosted) alternative. (I used desktop clients, and now a sync service, but I am a minority of a minority).

I miss LiveJournal for the community and the fine-grained perms and groups, but I don’t miss centralised places to do things; it’s no different to Medium in that regard, and I am sad by the amount of content that has gone to that place.

Of course, the connective tissue argument is also about eyeballs. People publish to Medium to maximise readership, especially from strangers, and I preferred the slower pace of networked discovery - finding new people and places to read via others’ links - that slower-moving, decentralised networks gave. Basically, I didn’t care about an audience. This is not good for professional publishing, but fine, imho, for personal blogging. (This, of course, is the problem with so much social media: it works very well with people you “know” in whatever capacity - online friends, peers, colleagues, comrades, and close RL friends - and far less well for yelling @everyone.)

8 Likes
#104

What @emenel said. The web itself - the underlying stuff - is basically fine, justification of decimal points not withstanding. FTP still works, plain old HTML still works. But the layers of complexity - especially in supposedly popular platforms - added is now getting hard to suggest on-ramps to people. I find it hard to explain to neophytes how to start with ‘making web pages’ these days because my answers are all out of date. But, crucially, they still work. (See also the success of PHP and cgi-bin, as solutions that Just Worked via file upload.)

The Web still works like it always did; what we’ve glued on top of it, be it arcane development environments or ever-higher-walled-gardens is what’s changed a little, and I too am sad about this.

5 Likes
#105

Two basic reasons here: the restructuring of everything around commerce (ads, shopping carts), and a much broader technological imperative that views everything as a resource to be optimized, thereby reducing everything to its data.

This reduction is not merely a way of thinking – it also acts, or legislates – witness how Facebook has restructured the very idea of friendship around likes and recommendations. Not simply the idea of relationship but the relationships themselves have been transformed.

So if anything worthwhile is to exist it will always be in the margins, in making use of discarded technologies, or byproducts or inefficiencies that arise along the way. The fact that something like LiveJournal came to exist at all was accidental – someone was experimenting, trying to learn web technologies and the community just kind of built itself.

But the margins don’t endure – it’s like building a house on quicksand. The only certainty is the absolute precarity of the margins and of marginal existence. So this basic process of even trying to exist online – or trying to exist at all, for that matter – is always one in which one is forced to move between platforms, use technologies which have been abandoned, or where things don’t work. People – usually the ones with the most to offer – get discouraged and stop. And there is no guarantee that new people will fill the void.

I see all this in the fact the few blogs that I follow really aren’t “social” at all – comments are minimal or nonexistent, it mostly just goes back to one individual’s long-form writing (or sharing of other media), and occasionally some links to other blogs (most of which are broken).

e.g.

http://50watts.com
https://blogthehum.com [no longer updated]
http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/
https://itself.blog

etc.

I do follow a few tumblrs but find the process quite discouraging – mostly reblogs leading
back to other reblogs, never quite getting to the source of anything, way too much noise. There’s also something very twitter-like in the format which seems to discourage substantive contributions. So – always with great effort, but sometimes a few gems can be found.

Anyway – for the most part I’m resigned to all of this stuff, my own activity especially – being marginal, forgotten, not archived, not remembered, it’s the very way it’s constituted that makes it unsustainable.

2 Likes
#106

Time has swallowed a thousand Aristotles.

I did not make that up but I also forget the source.

3 Likes
#107

BTW, this site / tutorial is great if you want to go straight to HTML. Keeping CSS simple is hard. https://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/

2 Likes
#108

It’s definitely hard in a corporate context. For a personal website, CSS can be quite simple.

2 Likes
#109

I also think web components are possibly a good alternative to some of the things I want from a static site generator…I want to focus on content instead of formatting…writing in pure html means I have to spend a good amount of time focusing on design as I write. Web components can abstract some of that away without going full on static site generator. At least…that’s the theory.

1 Like
#110

I’d add to that a third reason: professionalization of the building of internet “things” as a result of vast commercialization.

There is a great set of essays about technological reductionism on the JODS journal.

https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/issue-5

This is a bit of a tangent, and might belong more in the Quitting FB or even Democracy topics :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#111

:100: agreed…which I think that link does a good job of proving.

2 Likes
#112

You do not need to install go, unless you’d want to compile the source.
hugo is a standalone executable.

1 Like
#113

I’ve kept comments on for disquiet.com, though I have thought about removing them. Comments don’t occur that often, but 99.99% of the time WordPress catches the spam ones, so it’s no work on my end. I imagine that if I did turn them off, people would just email me their thoughts, but I worry I might miss some folks who’d not take that step. Like, I wrote this story recently for hilobrow.com about a dummy jack I treasure, and then someone replied to a mention of it I made on disquiet.com with a comment about their own dummy jack. Not sure if they’d have taken the time to write to me if commenting wasn’t available.

1 Like