For you, but not by us
February 5, 2024 1:42 AM Subscribe
For better or worse, the web doesn’t work like that anymore. No one clicks a webpage hoping to learn which cat can haz cheeseburger. Weirdos, maybe. Sickos.
No, we get our content from a For You Page now— algorithmically selected videos and images made by our favorite creators, produced explicitly for our preferred platform. Which platform doesn’t matter much. So long as it’s one of the big five. Creators churn out content for all of them. It’s a technical marvel, that internet. Something so mindblowingly impressive that if you showed it to someone even thirty years ago, their face would melt the fuck off. So why does it feel like something’s missing? Why are we all so collectively unhappy with the state of the web? from Where have all the websites gone?
Related:
mmm.page could make you enjoy the internet again [TechCrunch]
Websites that spark joy [The Whimsical Web]
Related:
mmm.page could make you enjoy the internet again [TechCrunch]
Websites that spark joy [The Whimsical Web]
Very simply, Google killed reader, because it didn’t see the point of supporting tiny websites. This one move destabilised the web economy by feeding discovery from individuals (power users of reader) to corporations. In the past few years we’ve seen some efforts to route around this central gap take hold - Substack almost had it - and we’ve seen some sights wiff it - looking at you xitter, Reddit - but there is a general annoyance at the way the internet has turned from wild frontier to corporate showroom.
posted by The River Ivel at 4:55 AM on February 5 [27 favorites]
posted by The River Ivel at 4:55 AM on February 5 [27 favorites]
He started the article way too late down the timeline. By New Years' Eve 2009, the web had long stopped working like it was supposed to. You can't 'yes-we-did-have-facebook-but'.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:00 AM on February 5 [9 favorites]
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:00 AM on February 5 [9 favorites]
Very simply, Google killed reader, because it didn’t see the point of supporting tiny websites.
Because tiny websites don't have in-app purchases that Google can take 30% of.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:10 AM on February 5 [14 favorites]
Because tiny websites don't have in-app purchases that Google can take 30% of.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:10 AM on February 5 [14 favorites]
You know what I miss? Fashion blogs. I don't want to scroll Instagram and look at a little piece of upbeat text next to a fancy photo. I want to remember that it is Thursday and there's always something new at, eg, Regency Costuming In Bristol or the blog by Australian sustainable fashion designer who is always broke or the woman who only ever wears black and white thrifted looks and go to those websites and read what they have to say. A dashed off post about something they saw online is fine, or an OOTD post.
Or Lesley Kinzel, writer of Two Whole Cakes, a fat-positive blog. Her very elaborate wardrobe of dresses with pockets was my real reason for visiting. Her blog is still up, at least, though moribund since 2012.
Or the blogs by the fifty- and sixty-something women who wrote about aging and fashion, or just their fashions. I've been reading the last active one for probably fifteen years, since "aging" was some hand-sized cloud on my distant horizon, and now I'm approaching the target age for the blog. The others went silent or switched to a more "professional" rather than chronological layout and now I can't find anything.
And the racial justice blogs I used to read all the time - I follow some of those people, like BlackAmazon, on social media, but TransGriot! Womanist Musings! The Angry Black Woman, Racialicious. There was a whole set of blogs that linked each other very assiduously, and so there were many more that I'd read sometimes. I am not exaggerating when I say that my life would be very different without those blogs, and I'd be a different person. I don't claim to be an especially outstanding person, but I'd definitely be worse.
I understand that people have to make a living and it's not really possible for most people to be largely unpaid high-quality bloggers for, like twenty years, but it's sad that as folks have moved along the system has changed so that others have not taken their places.
Like, with the racial justice blogs, I appreciate people's social media presence and I definitely seek out their paid work online - it's not that if it isn't a blog I can't be bothered to make an effort. But the blog form was so good - more sustained than social media, good and sustained comment sections because social media wasn't yet around to direct mobbings (not that everything was always fantastic, but compared to social media it was paradise).
Now, I admit that when I say that I feel dumber about current events because there aren't blogs, my immediate response is to imagine people saying "wow, dumber than you were back then, I'm amazed you can come in out of the rain", but whatever heights I attained then were certainly higher than the ones I attain now.
(People always say to listen to podcasts, but I'm not going to lie, I hate podcasts. I hate people's broadcasting mannerisms and voices, I hate that even if I speed it up it is sloooooooooow compared to reading, I hate that I have to slog through all the badinage and irony, etc. I am willing to listen to specific podcasts if I know the people or if friends are into them because that makes it a social thing, but podcasts will never replace blogs.)
posted by Frowner at 6:40 AM on February 5 [60 favorites]
Or Lesley Kinzel, writer of Two Whole Cakes, a fat-positive blog. Her very elaborate wardrobe of dresses with pockets was my real reason for visiting. Her blog is still up, at least, though moribund since 2012.
Or the blogs by the fifty- and sixty-something women who wrote about aging and fashion, or just their fashions. I've been reading the last active one for probably fifteen years, since "aging" was some hand-sized cloud on my distant horizon, and now I'm approaching the target age for the blog. The others went silent or switched to a more "professional" rather than chronological layout and now I can't find anything.
And the racial justice blogs I used to read all the time - I follow some of those people, like BlackAmazon, on social media, but TransGriot! Womanist Musings! The Angry Black Woman, Racialicious. There was a whole set of blogs that linked each other very assiduously, and so there were many more that I'd read sometimes. I am not exaggerating when I say that my life would be very different without those blogs, and I'd be a different person. I don't claim to be an especially outstanding person, but I'd definitely be worse.
I understand that people have to make a living and it's not really possible for most people to be largely unpaid high-quality bloggers for, like twenty years, but it's sad that as folks have moved along the system has changed so that others have not taken their places.
Like, with the racial justice blogs, I appreciate people's social media presence and I definitely seek out their paid work online - it's not that if it isn't a blog I can't be bothered to make an effort. But the blog form was so good - more sustained than social media, good and sustained comment sections because social media wasn't yet around to direct mobbings (not that everything was always fantastic, but compared to social media it was paradise).
Now, I admit that when I say that I feel dumber about current events because there aren't blogs, my immediate response is to imagine people saying "wow, dumber than you were back then, I'm amazed you can come in out of the rain", but whatever heights I attained then were certainly higher than the ones I attain now.
(People always say to listen to podcasts, but I'm not going to lie, I hate podcasts. I hate people's broadcasting mannerisms and voices, I hate that even if I speed it up it is sloooooooooow compared to reading, I hate that I have to slog through all the badinage and irony, etc. I am willing to listen to specific podcasts if I know the people or if friends are into them because that makes it a social thing, but podcasts will never replace blogs.)
posted by Frowner at 6:40 AM on February 5 [60 favorites]
I have a personal video game blog (started in 2009, though I'd been blogging since around 2002), and still write there, but it's hard. Hoo boy, is it hard. It's so much easier to dash off a quick message on social media, or post my impressions to one of a few small game-related Discords I'm on.
Last year, after a six month post drought, I decided to refresh the blog's look, which I hadn't done since its tenth anniversary. Completely moved away from the old theme template I had hacked into multiple variants, and hacked a different one instead; one of the gifts the Old Internet gave me is the ability and motivation to become really good at CSS. I made a few new posts since then, and nothing since mid-December, not even my usual year-end wrap-up. I seriously don't know how much longer I'll keep this up, but I've been trying.
There are a few bigger small blogs I still follow-- a few even post more than once a week-- but they're rarities, and just barely hanging on themselves. I agree with The River Ivel that Google Reader's death had a lot to do with this current situation.
posted by May Kasahara at 7:16 AM on February 5 [7 favorites]
Last year, after a six month post drought, I decided to refresh the blog's look, which I hadn't done since its tenth anniversary. Completely moved away from the old theme template I had hacked into multiple variants, and hacked a different one instead; one of the gifts the Old Internet gave me is the ability and motivation to become really good at CSS. I made a few new posts since then, and nothing since mid-December, not even my usual year-end wrap-up. I seriously don't know how much longer I'll keep this up, but I've been trying.
There are a few bigger small blogs I still follow-- a few even post more than once a week-- but they're rarities, and just barely hanging on themselves. I agree with The River Ivel that Google Reader's death had a lot to do with this current situation.
posted by May Kasahara at 7:16 AM on February 5 [7 favorites]
Forget the little cute fun webpages - lately I've even been seeing BUSINESSES forgo a web page and they just get an instagram instead.
Which drives me NUTS because: I'll hear about a new restaurant in my neighborhood, I'll wonder "ooh, I wonder what their hours are or what the menu's like", and I'll go online to look - and then I'll find that this new restaurant does not HAVE a web site, it only has an Instagram page, where I can go and look at curated photos of the interior and maybe a couple photos of their sandwiches or something.
This does not help me as a potential customer.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:22 AM on February 5 [78 favorites]
Which drives me NUTS because: I'll hear about a new restaurant in my neighborhood, I'll wonder "ooh, I wonder what their hours are or what the menu's like", and I'll go online to look - and then I'll find that this new restaurant does not HAVE a web site, it only has an Instagram page, where I can go and look at curated photos of the interior and maybe a couple photos of their sandwiches or something.
This does not help me as a potential customer.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:22 AM on February 5 [78 favorites]
Worth noting that long-time favorite A Dress A Day still posts from time to time. Do I sew? A little embroidery and mending, that's about it. Do I wear women's clothes or any kind of dress for whatever gender? I do not. For why do I read a blog that is literally all about sewing dresses? Dunno, but I have dress opinions.
Vincent Briggs, the prettiest gentleman about town, has a blog although I fear that he is drifting toward social media. Again, sewing far beyond my capacity or indeed interest, but an extremely engaging read.
posted by Frowner at 7:30 AM on February 5 [6 favorites]
Vincent Briggs, the prettiest gentleman about town, has a blog although I fear that he is drifting toward social media. Again, sewing far beyond my capacity or indeed interest, but an extremely engaging read.
posted by Frowner at 7:30 AM on February 5 [6 favorites]
I enjoy A Dress A Day partly because I like seeing her changing/continuous taste in dresses - she gets very, very into a particular pattern and makes it a lot for a while and then moves on, giving away or selling any dresses she doesn't want to keep. Her favorite patterns and fabrics have in a sense changed a lot over the years (I've been reading her blog forever) but there is a throughline.
Blogs can be such great portraits of people over time - during covid but before the vaccines, there were several clothing and design blogs where I just...read the whole thing as a way to relax and forget my anxieties. Every night I'd read some more posts backwards. I don't know how I'd feel about reading a whole blog in this way if it were extremely personal and intense - maybe the writer would find that really weird and creepy. But I'm relatively sure that "a history of my growth as a costumer with some posts about travel, my town and events" is fairly okay.
posted by Frowner at 7:34 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
Blogs can be such great portraits of people over time - during covid but before the vaccines, there were several clothing and design blogs where I just...read the whole thing as a way to relax and forget my anxieties. Every night I'd read some more posts backwards. I don't know how I'd feel about reading a whole blog in this way if it were extremely personal and intense - maybe the writer would find that really weird and creepy. But I'm relatively sure that "a history of my growth as a costumer with some posts about travel, my town and events" is fairly okay.
posted by Frowner at 7:34 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
You know what I miss? Fashion blogs.
Tom + Lorenzo are here for you.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:50 AM on February 5 [4 favorites]
Tom + Lorenzo are here for you.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:50 AM on February 5 [4 favorites]
> He started the article way too late down the timeline. By New Years' Eve 2009, the web had long stopped working like it was supposed to. You can't 'yes-we-did-have-facebook-but'.
oh hey i get to bang my drum.
the problem is search, y'all. social media is a problem but it is downstream from the big problem, which is that search is inescapably bad, both in a practical how-to-find-things sense and also in a moral sense. a web without search has geography, complexity, and culture, a web with search is a highly explosive monoculture eucalyptus forest planted where no eucalyptuses should grow.
on the bright side, chatbots have provided (and will continue to provide) one indispensable service: they are breaking and will continue to break anything that purports to 1. index the whole web 2. be good at surfacing good content from the whole web.
moreover: the way to find good content, the way that is vastly superior to googling and vastly superior to using any hypothetical future search engine is the way we find good content on metafilter, and the way this article proposes finding good content: by word of mouth.
social media only heightens the problems introduced by the existence of things that purport to be indexes of the whole web that are good at surfacing good content from the whole web. it does this via a man in the middle attack where the platform gets between you and the people you're word-of-mouthing with and then search-engineifies the process, which is to say the platform interrupt attempts at word of mouth communication by refusing to surface most of that attempted communication instead of just presenting posts in reverse chronological order and comments in chronological order. the way the good lord intended.
like, keep reading articles about social media bad, because social media is bad and articles about it being bad are good, both in the moral sense and in the this-writing-brings-pleasure sense, but while you're reading those articles about social media bad keep in mind that everything in them applies tenfold to search engines. the dream of a fully indexed searchable web is the web's original sin. search bad, get off search, enjoy the slow death of the concept of a searchable web, and don't mourn google. because when we lose google we lose nothing of value.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:51 AM on February 5 [17 favorites]
oh hey i get to bang my drum.
the problem is search, y'all. social media is a problem but it is downstream from the big problem, which is that search is inescapably bad, both in a practical how-to-find-things sense and also in a moral sense. a web without search has geography, complexity, and culture, a web with search is a highly explosive monoculture eucalyptus forest planted where no eucalyptuses should grow.
on the bright side, chatbots have provided (and will continue to provide) one indispensable service: they are breaking and will continue to break anything that purports to 1. index the whole web 2. be good at surfacing good content from the whole web.
moreover: the way to find good content, the way that is vastly superior to googling and vastly superior to using any hypothetical future search engine is the way we find good content on metafilter, and the way this article proposes finding good content: by word of mouth.
social media only heightens the problems introduced by the existence of things that purport to be indexes of the whole web that are good at surfacing good content from the whole web. it does this via a man in the middle attack where the platform gets between you and the people you're word-of-mouthing with and then search-engineifies the process, which is to say the platform interrupt attempts at word of mouth communication by refusing to surface most of that attempted communication instead of just presenting posts in reverse chronological order and comments in chronological order. the way the good lord intended.
like, keep reading articles about social media bad, because social media is bad and articles about it being bad are good, both in the moral sense and in the this-writing-brings-pleasure sense, but while you're reading those articles about social media bad keep in mind that everything in them applies tenfold to search engines. the dream of a fully indexed searchable web is the web's original sin. search bad, get off search, enjoy the slow death of the concept of a searchable web, and don't mourn google. because when we lose google we lose nothing of value.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:51 AM on February 5 [17 favorites]
I recently started looking at BlueSky most days. I have FB and Twitter accounts but don't use them. I haven't looked at FB in years. Most of my looking at my phone is looking at a web browser, and mostly what I'm looking at is blogs. I do have to admit, the pickings are thinner there than they used to be. I do kind of miss memepool.com.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:24 AM on February 5 [8 favorites]
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:24 AM on February 5 [8 favorites]
the problem is search, y'all. social media is a problem but it is downstream from the big problem, which is that search is inescapably bad, both in a practical how-to-find-things sense and also in a moral sense.
This. 1000% this.
Thanks in part to MetaFilter, I stumbled into a career in blogging 18 years ago. I had a successful go at it. But I lost relevance when I wouldn't play the games that search-engine optimization required, when I wouldn't chase the next new shiny toy (social media, video, what have you). Not sharing sour grapes — I've been fortunate — just stating it like it is.
Now I attend blogging conferences and listen to the talks and sit around while my colleagues share the stuff they do: grabbing email addresses and phone numbers via cookies, gaming search engines, automating content generation with AI, and so on. All of this in pursuit of big bucks (which they get!). Again, not sour grapes. Just stating it like it is.
This is all made possible by search, which has gotten worse and worse as the years have gone on. Now even my colleagues find themselves screwed because Google is gradually shifting away from search results (even if those results are shitty) to other "features" that make the company money.
Over the past couple of years, I've given up. I sold my site. I abandoned social media. I've ditched Google for Kagi (and am attempting to remove myself completely from the Google ecosystem — Amazon next). I've come to realize that if I want the web to be what it used to be, I have to be part of the solution instead of just bitching about it.
Speaking of which, y'all should go check out this front-page post from last night. It pretty much typifies what the web was like before search reshaped it into what it is today...
posted by jdroth at 8:28 AM on February 5 [24 favorites]
This. 1000% this.
Thanks in part to MetaFilter, I stumbled into a career in blogging 18 years ago. I had a successful go at it. But I lost relevance when I wouldn't play the games that search-engine optimization required, when I wouldn't chase the next new shiny toy (social media, video, what have you). Not sharing sour grapes — I've been fortunate — just stating it like it is.
Now I attend blogging conferences and listen to the talks and sit around while my colleagues share the stuff they do: grabbing email addresses and phone numbers via cookies, gaming search engines, automating content generation with AI, and so on. All of this in pursuit of big bucks (which they get!). Again, not sour grapes. Just stating it like it is.
This is all made possible by search, which has gotten worse and worse as the years have gone on. Now even my colleagues find themselves screwed because Google is gradually shifting away from search results (even if those results are shitty) to other "features" that make the company money.
Over the past couple of years, I've given up. I sold my site. I abandoned social media. I've ditched Google for Kagi (and am attempting to remove myself completely from the Google ecosystem — Amazon next). I've come to realize that if I want the web to be what it used to be, I have to be part of the solution instead of just bitching about it.
Speaking of which, y'all should go check out this front-page post from last night. It pretty much typifies what the web was like before search reshaped it into what it is today...
posted by jdroth at 8:28 AM on February 5 [24 favorites]
I appreciated this article so much- I think that what people miss a lot in discussions on these matters is that social media consolidated the 90% lurking their days away online. It was suddenly a lot easier to have all the people and content you wanted to keep track of come to you. Instead of hunting and pecking and going around to a million different bookmarks, once tumblr came around and you could follow a bunch of blogs, all your bookmarks came to you. You no longer had to remember any sort of route for your daily journey to the end of the internet and back. You could just scroll and scroll and scroll if that's what you were into, and post if you had something that you wanted to talk about, or repost if you just saw something that tickled you. You could also imagine that you had an audience.
Google reader died pretty quickly after tumblr and twitter took off, and only the more hardcore of websurfers at the time even knew what RSS was. The web barely had a chance. What a loss. I know that I can still RSS, but i confess that i don't.
Once our phone cameras got good enough, the kids who were happy to reblog wanted to build an audience of their own, and then everybodys mom and lame cousin and neighborhood restaurant got addicted to likes and follows and metrics of social media, hoodwinked into thinking that everyone who followed them would see every bit of content they ever posted, and that those follower counts gave them meaning.
Of course all the platforms were never interested in showing you everything you ever followed, they wanted to build a vast repository of captured eyeballs they could sell ads against, so they showed you the stuff that keep you coming back, and suddenly all these creative people publishing for the thrill of it don't get the same engagement as the folks who are repackaging screenshots of memes they have harvested elsewhere and the thrill is gone. Your own blog audience that you asked to follow you on instagram has been usurped by the platform to use for their own purposes, and spending hours on a perfectly packaged blog post starts to feel like a lonely waste of time when you could just dash off a quick IG post and harvest some dopamine from the likes. Instagram is simply where everyone and their mom is hanging out those days.
At least on Tumblr you were making websites. I am happy that it is still kicking, and I still keep a bunch of little blogs there, mostly for my own joy, and also because it's sometimes the easiest way to create a linked list that you can reference from anywhere you might be wanting it in the future, just as easy as dialing up the URL. Try finding a list of recipe links that you wanted to try from your instagram while you're at the grocery store. You simply can't do it.
I miss Stumbleupon, which was actually a massive driver of traffic in the old web days, and gave a lot of those little indie sites a great non-search mechanism for getting discovered.
I also miss the glory days of Flickr, which was a massive hub for all sorts of niche hobbies i learned so much from. It also had a lot of different ways to engage and find pockets of people interested in the same thing talking amongst themselves.
At some point a few years into Tumblr, I had tens of thousands of followers. When tumblr eventually readied their analytics, I found out that my posts were getting seen by the low digit hundreds. But by that point, Instagram and Snapchat were getting a lot more time spent from the masses. Eventually I removed the note count from my blog theme, because there's nothing like a heartfelt blog post with with zero or 3 likes in the age of social media. I'm not even chasing likes, but the numbers feel pathetic. But even if no one else is looking at them literally ever, I love my blogs. They make me feel more human. The best blog is your own blog, because blogging is just fun.
If I could wave a wand to fix things, i would bring back the visibility of RSS feeds everywhere remove public follower counts and like counts everywhere. I guess i would let reddit keep their upvote + downvote counts, but i would obscure them in the interface. Maybe you could have some sort of neilsen-esque clearinghouse for tallying up influence so that people and publications could still monetize their own audiences, but i think it would bring back a certain just-for-funzies! mentality that allowed niche sites to flourish. Niche Directories, new Stumbleupon, and then we're off to the races.
NB, still need someone to underwrite professional journalists/photographers/artists/etc so that we still have link fodder, career paths, and high quality information and debunking for all the nonsense. I don't think we can count on the AI folks for this.
posted by wowenthusiast at 8:56 AM on February 5 [16 favorites]
Google reader died pretty quickly after tumblr and twitter took off, and only the more hardcore of websurfers at the time even knew what RSS was. The web barely had a chance. What a loss. I know that I can still RSS, but i confess that i don't.
Once our phone cameras got good enough, the kids who were happy to reblog wanted to build an audience of their own, and then everybodys mom and lame cousin and neighborhood restaurant got addicted to likes and follows and metrics of social media, hoodwinked into thinking that everyone who followed them would see every bit of content they ever posted, and that those follower counts gave them meaning.
Of course all the platforms were never interested in showing you everything you ever followed, they wanted to build a vast repository of captured eyeballs they could sell ads against, so they showed you the stuff that keep you coming back, and suddenly all these creative people publishing for the thrill of it don't get the same engagement as the folks who are repackaging screenshots of memes they have harvested elsewhere and the thrill is gone. Your own blog audience that you asked to follow you on instagram has been usurped by the platform to use for their own purposes, and spending hours on a perfectly packaged blog post starts to feel like a lonely waste of time when you could just dash off a quick IG post and harvest some dopamine from the likes. Instagram is simply where everyone and their mom is hanging out those days.
At least on Tumblr you were making websites. I am happy that it is still kicking, and I still keep a bunch of little blogs there, mostly for my own joy, and also because it's sometimes the easiest way to create a linked list that you can reference from anywhere you might be wanting it in the future, just as easy as dialing up the URL. Try finding a list of recipe links that you wanted to try from your instagram while you're at the grocery store. You simply can't do it.
I miss Stumbleupon, which was actually a massive driver of traffic in the old web days, and gave a lot of those little indie sites a great non-search mechanism for getting discovered.
I also miss the glory days of Flickr, which was a massive hub for all sorts of niche hobbies i learned so much from. It also had a lot of different ways to engage and find pockets of people interested in the same thing talking amongst themselves.
At some point a few years into Tumblr, I had tens of thousands of followers. When tumblr eventually readied their analytics, I found out that my posts were getting seen by the low digit hundreds. But by that point, Instagram and Snapchat were getting a lot more time spent from the masses. Eventually I removed the note count from my blog theme, because there's nothing like a heartfelt blog post with with zero or 3 likes in the age of social media. I'm not even chasing likes, but the numbers feel pathetic. But even if no one else is looking at them literally ever, I love my blogs. They make me feel more human. The best blog is your own blog, because blogging is just fun.
If I could wave a wand to fix things, i would bring back the visibility of RSS feeds everywhere remove public follower counts and like counts everywhere. I guess i would let reddit keep their upvote + downvote counts, but i would obscure them in the interface. Maybe you could have some sort of neilsen-esque clearinghouse for tallying up influence so that people and publications could still monetize their own audiences, but i think it would bring back a certain just-for-funzies! mentality that allowed niche sites to flourish. Niche Directories, new Stumbleupon, and then we're off to the races.
NB, still need someone to underwrite professional journalists/photographers/artists/etc so that we still have link fodder, career paths, and high quality information and debunking for all the nonsense. I don't think we can count on the AI folks for this.
posted by wowenthusiast at 8:56 AM on February 5 [16 favorites]
I miss the old days of the web, too. But that first link in the list of suggested sites in the FPP article is to a dead person's Tumblr thing, not a "free-standing" website. Not the strongest argument if your site lives on someone else's box.
posted by emelenjr at 8:58 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
posted by emelenjr at 8:58 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
Empress, you took the words right out of my mouth. I can't stand when I go to check out a new shop/restaurant/clothing designer and cannot easily find their open hours, menu, or address on a social media page. And literally ALL they have is, you guessed it, one social media page.
I love visual media, and I'm absolute shit at producing this type of content myself. But sometimes, you really just need the basics. As much as the web promised us a lifetime of convenience and instant gratification, the Walled Garden Takeover that happened between 2008 (right about when MySpace stopped being a slow-to-load customized Eye Gumbo filled with fantastical musical artists sharing brand new music FOR FREE!) and 2010 (your mom's boss just tried to add you on Facebook) sped up the enshittification of the internet like it was the chocolate-assembly-line episode of I Love Lucy played at 2x speed.
I shelved my LiveJournal long ago, and that makes me part of the problem in that I didn't just move onto my own domain when the servers moved permanently to Russia. It's harder than ever (and also easier than ever, if you have infinite free time and no need for monetization whatsoever) to start a blog. But if you blog in 2024, will anyone read it? How will they discover you without a constellation of social trust satellites (TikTok, Facebook, X) beaming users directly to your little blog planet?
You can't just have a blog anymore, you also need viral videos, Stories, Instagram slideshows, weekly selfies, and QR codes giving visitors a discount for your favorite unbleached cotton 600-thread-count sheet set, too.
That said, I have discovered a few really amazing style icons on Instagram, but few have the blogs I would gladly follow and read regularly. HipSilver isn't bad, AdvancedStyle's Instagram page is fantastic and they also have a blog, Design Milk is good for everyday inspiration/discovering new interior design ideas, and DesignBoom scratches that same itch when it comes to architecture and how it influences modern designers.
But I also really miss thoughtful style bloggers like Twisted Lamb. Basically, anything that isn't also a store or 45% covered in random ad placements now seems kind of doomed to fail, and I hate that.
I would much rather read longer blog posts than nothing but photo-based affiliate sales links, and it feels like that part of the internet went extinct in the last 15 years.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 9:07 AM on February 5 [6 favorites]
I love visual media, and I'm absolute shit at producing this type of content myself. But sometimes, you really just need the basics. As much as the web promised us a lifetime of convenience and instant gratification, the Walled Garden Takeover that happened between 2008 (right about when MySpace stopped being a slow-to-load customized Eye Gumbo filled with fantastical musical artists sharing brand new music FOR FREE!) and 2010 (your mom's boss just tried to add you on Facebook) sped up the enshittification of the internet like it was the chocolate-assembly-line episode of I Love Lucy played at 2x speed.
I shelved my LiveJournal long ago, and that makes me part of the problem in that I didn't just move onto my own domain when the servers moved permanently to Russia. It's harder than ever (and also easier than ever, if you have infinite free time and no need for monetization whatsoever) to start a blog. But if you blog in 2024, will anyone read it? How will they discover you without a constellation of social trust satellites (TikTok, Facebook, X) beaming users directly to your little blog planet?
You can't just have a blog anymore, you also need viral videos, Stories, Instagram slideshows, weekly selfies, and QR codes giving visitors a discount for your favorite unbleached cotton 600-thread-count sheet set, too.
That said, I have discovered a few really amazing style icons on Instagram, but few have the blogs I would gladly follow and read regularly. HipSilver isn't bad, AdvancedStyle's Instagram page is fantastic and they also have a blog, Design Milk is good for everyday inspiration/discovering new interior design ideas, and DesignBoom scratches that same itch when it comes to architecture and how it influences modern designers.
But I also really miss thoughtful style bloggers like Twisted Lamb. Basically, anything that isn't also a store or 45% covered in random ad placements now seems kind of doomed to fail, and I hate that.
I would much rather read longer blog posts than nothing but photo-based affiliate sales links, and it feels like that part of the internet went extinct in the last 15 years.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 9:07 AM on February 5 [6 favorites]
> on the bright side, chatbots...
Nice try, ChatGPT. ;)
(Only slighty related, I just learned that "ChatGPT" sounds like saying "Kitty I Have Farted" in French).
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 9:13 AM on February 5 [11 favorites]
Nice try, ChatGPT. ;)
(Only slighty related, I just learned that "ChatGPT" sounds like saying "Kitty I Have Farted" in French).
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 9:13 AM on February 5 [11 favorites]
killing the search delusion is literally the only thing chatgpt is good for. it's a device for mashing up the web and turning it into precisely the type of slurry that search engines inherently, unfixably prefer. it's an anti-search jamming device, it's the world's greatest chaff factory, it's a beautiful incoherency generator, it's a machine for canceling out content by generating anti-content, sort of like how noise-cancelling headphones cancel ambient sound by inverting it.
there is nothing wrong with chatgpt, so long as you never use it to produce anything for anyone to actually read.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:19 AM on February 5 [17 favorites]
there is nothing wrong with chatgpt, so long as you never use it to produce anything for anyone to actually read.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:19 AM on February 5 [17 favorites]
And I got here via Everlasting Blort, which if that isn't a site living up to its name I don't know what is, which I found after inventing the word "blort" to use in a try for a Googlewhack that I'm really glad didn't work.
This is a bit of a derail, but Everlasting Blort is wonderful. Thank you for that link flabdablet!
Is the quonsar I see posting there Metafilter’s own?
posted by vorpal bunny at 9:22 AM on February 5 [3 favorites]
This is a bit of a derail, but Everlasting Blort is wonderful. Thank you for that link flabdablet!
Is the quonsar I see posting there Metafilter’s own?
posted by vorpal bunny at 9:22 AM on February 5 [3 favorites]
> there is nothing wrong with chatgpt, so long as you never use it to produce usable content for anyone to actually read.
Apologies if my winky face was too subtle, I was attempting to do a funny. I agree that ChatGPT has uses, as long as its pap output (papput?) isn't actually deployed for human consumption.
Some of my fellow programmers insist that ChatGPT is useful for their work, as it guesses what you are trying to accomplish, and suggests swaths of working code. I have yet to try it, but it sounds icky to me; like an automated open source license violator.
Anyway, I digress.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 9:27 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
Apologies if my winky face was too subtle, I was attempting to do a funny. I agree that ChatGPT has uses, as long as its pap output (papput?) isn't actually deployed for human consumption.
Some of my fellow programmers insist that ChatGPT is useful for their work, as it guesses what you are trying to accomplish, and suggests swaths of working code. I have yet to try it, but it sounds icky to me; like an automated open source license violator.
Anyway, I digress.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 9:27 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
I still run a occasionally updated blog site but almost everyone I know who also ran personal websites 15 years ago has stopped. There are two main reasons:
* Difficulty. It just harder to create a website these days. Long gone are the days of slapping together some HTML and under-construction.gif an calling it a day. Now to make a site that looks decent on 30 inch monitors and 6 inch tall mobile screens you have to much around with CSS and maybe some scripting. Templates are available but then you have to conform to the templated design and learn how to use that.
* Security. Almost everyone I knew eventually got hacked. Even today a huge percentage of my access logs are from bots scanning for wordpress vulnerabilities. It only takes getting hacked once to really take the fun out of maintaining a site.
posted by AndrewStephens at 9:29 AM on February 5 [11 favorites]
* Difficulty. It just harder to create a website these days. Long gone are the days of slapping together some HTML and under-construction.gif an calling it a day. Now to make a site that looks decent on 30 inch monitors and 6 inch tall mobile screens you have to much around with CSS and maybe some scripting. Templates are available but then you have to conform to the templated design and learn how to use that.
* Security. Almost everyone I knew eventually got hacked. Even today a huge percentage of my access logs are from bots scanning for wordpress vulnerabilities. It only takes getting hacked once to really take the fun out of maintaining a site.
posted by AndrewStephens at 9:29 AM on February 5 [11 favorites]
Clickbait. Soundbite/catchphrase. Filler. Then lather, rinse and repeat.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 9:31 AM on February 5 [1 favorite]
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 9:31 AM on February 5 [1 favorite]
I've ditched Google for Kagi
Those guys seem pretty impressed with themselves. Are their search results really enough more useful to be worth what they're asking for them, in your experience?
posted by flabdablet at 9:44 AM on February 5 [1 favorite]
Those guys seem pretty impressed with themselves. Are their search results really enough more useful to be worth what they're asking for them, in your experience?
posted by flabdablet at 9:44 AM on February 5 [1 favorite]
> Now to make a site that looks decent on 30 inch monitors and 6 inch tall mobile screens you have to much around with CSS and maybe some scripting
what's the quickest way this decade to put up a website that has absolutely no css and uses absolutely no client-side scripting, like, a site where you use html as a markup language and remain totally agnostic about styling and layout?
literally this is a real question i am asking, because this is not something i've done since the 2000s and i'd like to know the contemporary way of doing it.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:45 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
what's the quickest way this decade to put up a website that has absolutely no css and uses absolutely no client-side scripting, like, a site where you use html as a markup language and remain totally agnostic about styling and layout?
literally this is a real question i am asking, because this is not something i've done since the 2000s and i'd like to know the contemporary way of doing it.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:45 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
Also really takes the joy out of going a website when you have to click away a popup begging for your email address, another desperate attempt at long-term audience capture. Old web didn't constantly remind you of your status as AUDIENCE the way that the current experience of websurfing does- where every link lands you on a pop up that you have to rage scan for an X button to dismiss. (and don't get me started on looking at my email inbox).
Everyone producing content feels so much more desperate/thirsty/undignified these days. Adding Taboola, Outbrain, and Appsumo to the villains list.
posted by wowenthusiast at 9:46 AM on February 5 [5 favorites]
Everyone producing content feels so much more desperate/thirsty/undignified these days. Adding Taboola, Outbrain, and Appsumo to the villains list.
posted by wowenthusiast at 9:46 AM on February 5 [5 favorites]
You're going to need some CSS because the default browser stylesheet is very bad. But ten lines to set reasonable margins and font sizes will go a long way.
posted by Pyry at 9:54 AM on February 5 [6 favorites]
posted by Pyry at 9:54 AM on February 5 [6 favorites]
Are [Kagi's] search results really enough more useful to be worth what they're asking for them, in your experience?
For me, yes. I've been using Kagi for maybe nine months (approx) now and I'm pleased with it. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I haven't noticed that the search results are any worse than modern Google results. Better, they're unclouded by all of the crap Google throws in nowadays. Plus, there are lots of great filtering options.
A lot of my decision to support Kagi, though, isn't about the quality of the results so much as it is the business model. I'm happy to pay $10/month for search if that means *I* am not the product.
posted by jdroth at 10:08 AM on February 5 [4 favorites]
For me, yes. I've been using Kagi for maybe nine months (approx) now and I'm pleased with it. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I haven't noticed that the search results are any worse than modern Google results. Better, they're unclouded by all of the crap Google throws in nowadays. Plus, there are lots of great filtering options.
A lot of my decision to support Kagi, though, isn't about the quality of the results so much as it is the business model. I'm happy to pay $10/month for search if that means *I* am not the product.
posted by jdroth at 10:08 AM on February 5 [4 favorites]
> what's the quickest way this decade to put up a website that has absolutely no css and uses absolutely no client-side scripting
Many ISPs used to provide simple hosting that was dead simple to use - just FTP some files and your site would be available at http://yourISP.com/~username/welcome.html.
These days you need to either rent your own host (I do this, $6 a month from DigitalOcean) and do some minimal setup, or muck around with services like github and cloudflare which can be configured to serve up files. A learning curve either way and you are going to have to register a domain at your own cost.
Then you have the problem that your no-css site is going to look terrible. Maybe you can get away with plain text, but as soon as you have images or any kind of formatting you need to take different screen sizes into account.
posted by AndrewStephens at 10:39 AM on February 5 [4 favorites]
Many ISPs used to provide simple hosting that was dead simple to use - just FTP some files and your site would be available at http://yourISP.com/~username/welcome.html.
These days you need to either rent your own host (I do this, $6 a month from DigitalOcean) and do some minimal setup, or muck around with services like github and cloudflare which can be configured to serve up files. A learning curve either way and you are going to have to register a domain at your own cost.
Then you have the problem that your no-css site is going to look terrible. Maybe you can get away with plain text, but as soon as you have images or any kind of formatting you need to take different screen sizes into account.
posted by AndrewStephens at 10:39 AM on February 5 [4 favorites]
I'm not going to lie, I hate podcasts
Yeah, me too. Actually, never use them. I like listening to the radio, but do a lot less since I retired, not driving so much anymore.
posted by Rash at 10:44 AM on February 5 [4 favorites]
Yeah, me too. Actually, never use them. I like listening to the radio, but do a lot less since I retired, not driving so much anymore.
posted by Rash at 10:44 AM on February 5 [4 favorites]
There are still shared webhosts. They're what I use (mine is ReclaimHosting and I'm happy with them), in preference to the more DIY virtual-server rentals like DigitalOcean. Webhosts have conveniences like CPanel and its one-click webapp installers, and they make some of the complexity (e.g. coping with getting a secure site set up) less unfathomably awful.
I still use WordPress as my site builder, mostly because of inertia, partly because its theme library is quite extensive. Gone are the days when I could hack together some decent-looking CSS all by myself. I just haven't kept up with CSS3 and beyond.
posted by humbug at 10:48 AM on February 5 [3 favorites]
I still use WordPress as my site builder, mostly because of inertia, partly because its theme library is quite extensive. Gone are the days when I could hack together some decent-looking CSS all by myself. I just haven't kept up with CSS3 and beyond.
posted by humbug at 10:48 AM on February 5 [3 favorites]
I'm not going to lie, I hate podcasts
I do not like Ted Talks.
posted by JanetLand at 10:49 AM on February 5 [5 favorites]
I do not like Ted Talks.
posted by JanetLand at 10:49 AM on February 5 [5 favorites]
you have the problem that your no-css site is going to look terrible. Maybe you can get away with plain text, but as soon as you have images or any kind of formatting you need to take different screen sizes into account.
I use CSS pretty much only for font colors, and my Robot Wisdom-inspired, hand-crafted HTML blog looks okay on both cell phones and the big screen. But even though I've been at it for 23 years now, updating every couple days, it's side-lined and ignored, apparently, since I don't make each post into an individual URL, which is apparently RSS-hostile. Maybe also 'cause I don't do comments, about which I really don't care; the project's really more for me than for you.
posted by Rash at 10:59 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
I use CSS pretty much only for font colors, and my Robot Wisdom-inspired, hand-crafted HTML blog looks okay on both cell phones and the big screen. But even though I've been at it for 23 years now, updating every couple days, it's side-lined and ignored, apparently, since I don't make each post into an individual URL, which is apparently RSS-hostile. Maybe also 'cause I don't do comments, about which I really don't care; the project's really more for me than for you.
posted by Rash at 10:59 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
Ugh, podcasts and Ted Talks! Forty minutes of blahblahblah with five minutes of information and very often lots of ego. Can't watch 'em.
Anymore, so much of the information is repeated, you can't find the itty bitty x, subscribe or go without, give your email and/or personal information, and fluff, so much fluff!
Oh my, Frowner, Vincent Briggs' website is absolutely fabulous! Will you look at this monster-patterned waistcoat? Too wonderful.
posted by BlueHorse at 11:00 AM on February 5 [3 favorites]
Anymore, so much of the information is repeated, you can't find the itty bitty x, subscribe or go without, give your email and/or personal information, and fluff, so much fluff!
Oh my, Frowner, Vincent Briggs' website is absolutely fabulous! Will you look at this monster-patterned waistcoat? Too wonderful.
posted by BlueHorse at 11:00 AM on February 5 [3 favorites]
I'm not going to lie, I hate podcasts
I can deal with podcasts as long as it has at least a 2X speed button. That thing makes average YouTube spoken content consumption so much more bearable.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:13 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
I can deal with podcasts as long as it has at least a 2X speed button. That thing makes average YouTube spoken content consumption so much more bearable.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:13 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
Is the quonsar I see posting there Metafilter’s own?
He was and at one time there was a "secret quonsar" tradition for Xmas. madamjujujive is still a member of Mefi and her info page has a nice collection of websites by Mefi members (though it may be a little out of date). I'm always checking out Everlasting Blort for interesting posts and "twice the fence post"!
And speaking of websites, perhaps a special Mefi area listing the websites created by members would be a nice addition?
posted by jabo at 11:15 AM on February 5 [6 favorites]
He was and at one time there was a "secret quonsar" tradition for Xmas. madamjujujive is still a member of Mefi and her info page has a nice collection of websites by Mefi members (though it may be a little out of date). I'm always checking out Everlasting Blort for interesting posts and "twice the fence post"!
And speaking of websites, perhaps a special Mefi area listing the websites created by members would be a nice addition?
posted by jabo at 11:15 AM on February 5 [6 favorites]
totally fine with images being displayed weird, etc., the question is more about whether there’s a quick/easy way to do it.
if the way to do it is significantly more fiddly than “put file on server,” probably the way to go (for everyone who doesn’t specifically fetishize the early90sweb aesthetic) is to just put yr stuff on tumblr and keep backups so you can move it if you have to, right?
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:16 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
if the way to do it is significantly more fiddly than “put file on server,” probably the way to go (for everyone who doesn’t specifically fetishize the early90sweb aesthetic) is to just put yr stuff on tumblr and keep backups so you can move it if you have to, right?
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:16 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
Is activitypub is some kind of solution? Like, I have a wordpress blog gathering cobwebs, and I have a mastodon account with literally dozens of followers, and if the wordpress thing could have the followers from mastodon (or any other activitypub site) that would make me want to use the site I actually own, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
posted by surlyben at 11:29 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
posted by surlyben at 11:29 AM on February 5 [2 favorites]
Good to see another ReclaimHosting fan here.
Coming in late, I can add: long-time blogger here who's still blogging. And commenting on other folks' blogs, and responding to comments on mine. Social media helps get the word out, but the blogospheric core still works for me.
(The backend: Reclaim Hosting and WordPress. I despise Gutenberg, though.)
posted by doctornemo at 11:38 AM on February 5 [3 favorites]
Coming in late, I can add: long-time blogger here who's still blogging. And commenting on other folks' blogs, and responding to comments on mine. Social media helps get the word out, but the blogospheric core still works for me.
(The backend: Reclaim Hosting and WordPress. I despise Gutenberg, though.)
posted by doctornemo at 11:38 AM on February 5 [3 favorites]
Forget the little cute fun webpages - lately I've even been seeing BUSINESSES forgo a web page and they just get an instagram instead.
YES!!!!!!!
I don't have Insta. I don't want Insta. I'm not creating an Insta account to find out that you're closing early on Thursday or your hours have changed. Come on.
posted by rhymedirective at 11:42 AM on February 5 [10 favorites]
YES!!!!!!!
I don't have Insta. I don't want Insta. I'm not creating an Insta account to find out that you're closing early on Thursday or your hours have changed. Come on.
posted by rhymedirective at 11:42 AM on February 5 [10 favorites]
I'll hear about a new restaurant in my neighborhood, I'll wonder "what their hours are or what the menu's like", and I'll go online to look - and then I'll find that this new restaurant does not HAVE a web site, it only has an Instagram page,
I'm not on IG either (so they've lost me there) but I thought this was an ongoing problem with restaurant web-sites, what customers want to see are hours, the address and the menu but what these restaurateurs insist on providing instead are un-captioned photos of dishes or even just some attempt at conveying ambience, in an overly-technical, cutesy form (you know, where stuff is hidden unless your scrolling uncovers more text). So instead, I don't bother, but just go to their Yelp reviews.
posted by Rash at 11:57 AM on February 5 [4 favorites]
I'm not on IG either (so they've lost me there) but I thought this was an ongoing problem with restaurant web-sites, what customers want to see are hours, the address and the menu but what these restaurateurs insist on providing instead are un-captioned photos of dishes or even just some attempt at conveying ambience, in an overly-technical, cutesy form (you know, where stuff is hidden unless your scrolling uncovers more text). So instead, I don't bother, but just go to their Yelp reviews.
posted by Rash at 11:57 AM on February 5 [4 favorites]
A good term to research if the state of the web gives you the 'ol despondency is "small web" or "smol web"
There are folks working to make the web more accessible to a greater variety of devices as well as more personal and less corporate.
There is also non-corporate, non algorithm-based social media now available, like Mastodon (link is to an instance choice helper site) and Cohost.
Another couple interesting things to research are gopher and gemini. Simpler protocols for simpler content. but refreshingly personal and non-corporate.
None of these things are truly suitable if your goal is "developing an audience" but if it's "connecting with like-minded folks" than you could do worse than a lot of what I've just talked about.
posted by signsofrain at 11:58 AM on February 5 [11 favorites]
There are folks working to make the web more accessible to a greater variety of devices as well as more personal and less corporate.
There is also non-corporate, non algorithm-based social media now available, like Mastodon (link is to an instance choice helper site) and Cohost.
Another couple interesting things to research are gopher and gemini. Simpler protocols for simpler content. but refreshingly personal and non-corporate.
None of these things are truly suitable if your goal is "developing an audience" but if it's "connecting with like-minded folks" than you could do worse than a lot of what I've just talked about.
posted by signsofrain at 11:58 AM on February 5 [11 favorites]
the problem is search, y'all. social media is a problem but it is downstream from the big problem, which is that search is inescapably bad, both in a practical how-to-find-things sense and also in a moral sense. a web without search has geography, complexity, and culture, a web with search is a highly explosive monoculture eucalyptus forest planted where no eucalyptuses should grow.
Once again, this is the argument of the privileged, which is why it lost out in the first place. Search is just as much "word of mouth" as your friend is, in that both are you relying on the wisdom of others to engage in discovery. And as it turns out, both modalities have strengths and weaknesses, which is why we do need both.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:04 PM on February 5 [9 favorites]
Once again, this is the argument of the privileged, which is why it lost out in the first place. Search is just as much "word of mouth" as your friend is, in that both are you relying on the wisdom of others to engage in discovery. And as it turns out, both modalities have strengths and weaknesses, which is why we do need both.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:04 PM on February 5 [9 favorites]
I have a personal video game blog (started in 2009, though I'd been blogging since around 2002), and still write there, but it's hard.
Are you me? I started my gaming blog in 2005 and often published new articles three times a day. Not bad for a one-person operation doing it for fun and a little money on the side. Then Google Reader died and readership plummeted overnight. Facebook and its video pivot hurt too. Now I publish maybe once a week and it's the site's podcast that I do with a friend (and I'm tired of being the butt of that joke). Nobody comments anymore. I think a few people are listening. It's depressing. I'd write more if I thought anyone would read it.
posted by Servo5678 at 12:19 PM on February 5 [5 favorites]
Are you me? I started my gaming blog in 2005 and often published new articles three times a day. Not bad for a one-person operation doing it for fun and a little money on the side. Then Google Reader died and readership plummeted overnight. Facebook and its video pivot hurt too. Now I publish maybe once a week and it's the site's podcast that I do with a friend (and I'm tired of being the butt of that joke). Nobody comments anymore. I think a few people are listening. It's depressing. I'd write more if I thought anyone would read it.
posted by Servo5678 at 12:19 PM on February 5 [5 favorites]
which is that search is inescapably bad, both in a practical how-to-find-things sense and also in a moral sense.
Is your argument that whole-web search is inherently and inescapably immoral or just that the current version or search, powered as it is by advertising dollars, is bad?
posted by jacquilynne at 1:18 PM on February 5 [2 favorites]
Is your argument that whole-web search is inherently and inescapably immoral or just that the current version or search, powered as it is by advertising dollars, is bad?
posted by jacquilynne at 1:18 PM on February 5 [2 favorites]
Forget the little cute fun webpages - lately I've even been seeing BUSINESSES forgo a web page and they just get an instagram instead.
Some music venues even do this and it drives me nuts. Instead of a calendar you have a disorganized set of images listing events out of order, interspersed with drink specials and the fact that you were closed for plumbing repairs two weeks ago.
Sometimes the venue does have a website but it’s just a carousel view of photos of barstools, Doc Martens, and Marshall amps, along with a week of event listings from 2022 and a covid policy that hasn’t been in force for three years.
posted by smelendez at 1:20 PM on February 5 [10 favorites]
Some music venues even do this and it drives me nuts. Instead of a calendar you have a disorganized set of images listing events out of order, interspersed with drink specials and the fact that you were closed for plumbing repairs two weeks ago.
Sometimes the venue does have a website but it’s just a carousel view of photos of barstools, Doc Martens, and Marshall amps, along with a week of event listings from 2022 and a covid policy that hasn’t been in force for three years.
posted by smelendez at 1:20 PM on February 5 [10 favorites]
> Kagi
Thanks jdroth for reminding me, at the appropriate point in the month for another recurring charge, that I was going to buy a family account. Though I was reminded here when it was discussed before, the fact that you're paying for it doesn't necessarily guarantee you're not the product, or that you don't become the product eventually.
But having a search service that takes me at my word when I say "I don't want to see anything that matches pattern" has gotten to be worth paying for. There are times when "sorry, got nothin'" is a better answer than an avalanche of irrelevancies.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 1:29 PM on February 5 [4 favorites]
Thanks jdroth for reminding me, at the appropriate point in the month for another recurring charge, that I was going to buy a family account. Though I was reminded here when it was discussed before, the fact that you're paying for it doesn't necessarily guarantee you're not the product, or that you don't become the product eventually.
But having a search service that takes me at my word when I say "I don't want to see anything that matches pattern" has gotten to be worth paying for. There are times when "sorry, got nothin'" is a better answer than an avalanche of irrelevancies.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 1:29 PM on February 5 [4 favorites]
Webpages for businesses require some guy with a lot of knowledge to create or regularly update, plus (generally) fees to run them from month to month.
Instagram requires a person in the businesses' family with a camera.
I've said this before, but the people who used to create websites for free now create tiktoks, generally for free. Image, video and audio editing has advanced at light speed while web editing has gone at best sideways. It's easy to see why everyone bailed.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:49 PM on February 5 [4 favorites]
Instagram requires a person in the businesses' family with a camera.
I've said this before, but the people who used to create websites for free now create tiktoks, generally for free. Image, video and audio editing has advanced at light speed while web editing has gone at best sideways. It's easy to see why everyone bailed.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:49 PM on February 5 [4 favorites]
I am a reasonably technically capable person. No coding genius or anything, but I have some training in the area, and jesus wept, I have been trying to get a working WordPress install on my personal website for a couple of months now and it is a nightmare of 'install this badly documented plug-in so that you can enable that badly documented plug-in and then try to guess how they work together'. Also, you get to pay for all these plug-ins separately. I can sure as hell see why you might consider an Instagram account more than enough for your business under these circumstances.
posted by jacquilynne at 2:59 PM on February 5 [3 favorites]
posted by jacquilynne at 2:59 PM on February 5 [3 favorites]
I don't really understand why the default style sheet for browsers is so bad. It hasn't changed at all since the background became white and not 75% grey, in what the late 90s?
Not even Chrome did anything about that when it came along.
posted by doiheartwentyone at 3:21 PM on February 5 [1 favorite]
Not even Chrome did anything about that when it came along.
posted by doiheartwentyone at 3:21 PM on February 5 [1 favorite]
yeah wordpress is too hard. Always has been.
It's kind of ominous that Automattic/Wordpress owns Tumblr now because it seems like they are slowly making it web-second, obscuring the theme customization options that made tumblr so unique and special in the first place. Automattic seems to want to obscure the existance of all the web themes and go full on social network in hopes that everyone will just follow and post a la instagram, and then graduate to wordpress when they want a REAL website. But wordpress themes and plugins are so much harder and more janky than tumblr.
A Tumblr has always been a real website that you can tinker with to your heart's content, even on a custom domain if you want, and It's still by far the easiest way to post anything you want to the web, customize how it looks on your website, AND have your content be followable and rebloggable in the great endless scroll of the dashboard. Hopefully Wordpress will come around on this and make Tumblr more bloggy again. It's currently better than the rest as a a place to scroll, but I'd hate to see it lose the web stuff that got a whole microgeneration learning html & css for their tumblr themes.
posted by wowenthusiast at 3:34 PM on February 5 [5 favorites]
It's kind of ominous that Automattic/Wordpress owns Tumblr now because it seems like they are slowly making it web-second, obscuring the theme customization options that made tumblr so unique and special in the first place. Automattic seems to want to obscure the existance of all the web themes and go full on social network in hopes that everyone will just follow and post a la instagram, and then graduate to wordpress when they want a REAL website. But wordpress themes and plugins are so much harder and more janky than tumblr.
A Tumblr has always been a real website that you can tinker with to your heart's content, even on a custom domain if you want, and It's still by far the easiest way to post anything you want to the web, customize how it looks on your website, AND have your content be followable and rebloggable in the great endless scroll of the dashboard. Hopefully Wordpress will come around on this and make Tumblr more bloggy again. It's currently better than the rest as a a place to scroll, but I'd hate to see it lose the web stuff that got a whole microgeneration learning html & css for their tumblr themes.
posted by wowenthusiast at 3:34 PM on February 5 [5 favorites]
I'll find that this new restaurant does not HAVE a web site, it only has an Instagram page, where I can go and look at curated photos of the interior and maybe a couple photos of their sandwiches or something
Then you go there and instead of menus they have a goddam QR code on a stick and you have to get out your phone and find the camera app and get out your reading glasses, which you asked your spouse to put in their purse because “you never know if they’ll have menus”, so you can pan around the giant PDF of the old paper menus they used to have, or probably just get a link to their instagram which prompts you to log in and you don’t have instagram. Then the waitress comes with some kinda tablet and looks down at it while she’s talking to you and the wait staff does some kinda random zone defense where it’s never clear who you are meant to flag down when they forget you might want more than one drink in a 45 minute period. And these are not cheap places! They’re basically telling people, “Go home and order this on DoorDash please, we hate you”.
posted by caviar2d2 at 3:49 PM on February 5 [11 favorites]
Then you go there and instead of menus they have a goddam QR code on a stick and you have to get out your phone and find the camera app and get out your reading glasses, which you asked your spouse to put in their purse because “you never know if they’ll have menus”, so you can pan around the giant PDF of the old paper menus they used to have, or probably just get a link to their instagram which prompts you to log in and you don’t have instagram. Then the waitress comes with some kinda tablet and looks down at it while she’s talking to you and the wait staff does some kinda random zone defense where it’s never clear who you are meant to flag down when they forget you might want more than one drink in a 45 minute period. And these are not cheap places! They’re basically telling people, “Go home and order this on DoorDash please, we hate you”.
posted by caviar2d2 at 3:49 PM on February 5 [11 favorites]
Of course all the platforms were never interested in showing you everything you ever followed, they wanted to build a vast repository of captured eyeballs they could sell ads against, so they showed you the stuff that keep you coming back
I feel like I should mention a fact about this phenomenon I've observed. It is easy to read a statement like this and dismiss it, scoffing at the idea that those people degraded the web experience of purpose, like they were engaging in a conscious act of evil. And while I don't doubt that there are some people who do this, it's not everyone. I think the people at Google didn't actually consciously set out to make the internet worse.
But there is a phenomenon with long-term services where they naturally steer towards their founder's financial interests, even if they're not consciously pushing in that direction. There are several mechanisms by which this happens, but the primary way is: changes caused by general day-to-day maintenance are random, but those changes that would negatively affect the bottom line, because they're directly measureable and result in decreased income, give off warning bells to maintainers much more strongly than other, more ineffable* changes.
To summarize the preceding paragraph: financial changes, even small ones, are felt more strongly by a site's maintainers than others, and that will naturally have an effect on the service's direction, even while they're telling themselves they're still a net good for the world.
Also: I maintain a daily gaming blog! And even though it's a lot of work, I love doing it! We find all kinds of weird things.
* I tried to find a clip of Idris Elba as Macavity in Cats to link here, disappearing in a poof of CG while shouting "Ineffable!" I am on spotty internet at the moment though and couldn't narrow one out of the crowd. You could find one yourself to watch, if you're really into that sort of thing.
posted by JHarris at 4:04 PM on February 5 [2 favorites]
I feel like I should mention a fact about this phenomenon I've observed. It is easy to read a statement like this and dismiss it, scoffing at the idea that those people degraded the web experience of purpose, like they were engaging in a conscious act of evil. And while I don't doubt that there are some people who do this, it's not everyone. I think the people at Google didn't actually consciously set out to make the internet worse.
But there is a phenomenon with long-term services where they naturally steer towards their founder's financial interests, even if they're not consciously pushing in that direction. There are several mechanisms by which this happens, but the primary way is: changes caused by general day-to-day maintenance are random, but those changes that would negatively affect the bottom line, because they're directly measureable and result in decreased income, give off warning bells to maintainers much more strongly than other, more ineffable* changes.
To summarize the preceding paragraph: financial changes, even small ones, are felt more strongly by a site's maintainers than others, and that will naturally have an effect on the service's direction, even while they're telling themselves they're still a net good for the world.
Also: I maintain a daily gaming blog! And even though it's a lot of work, I love doing it! We find all kinds of weird things.
* I tried to find a clip of Idris Elba as Macavity in Cats to link here, disappearing in a poof of CG while shouting "Ineffable!" I am on spotty internet at the moment though and couldn't narrow one out of the crowd. You could find one yourself to watch, if you're really into that sort of thing.
posted by JHarris at 4:04 PM on February 5 [2 favorites]
As a writer / journalist, a web without search would make my job impossible. Word of mouth is useless for research.
posted by jordantwodelta at 4:14 PM on February 5 [11 favorites]
posted by jordantwodelta at 4:14 PM on February 5 [11 favorites]
I use modern-normalize to, well, normalize default CSS an, uh, modern way.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:32 PM on February 5 [2 favorites]
posted by kirkaracha at 6:32 PM on February 5 [2 favorites]
Are you me?
I am not you, but you do sound like a few of my friends!
I turned off comments on my own blog ages ago and don't think I'll ever switch them back on.
posted by May Kasahara at 6:33 PM on February 5 [2 favorites]
I am not you, but you do sound like a few of my friends!
I turned off comments on my own blog ages ago and don't think I'll ever switch them back on.
posted by May Kasahara at 6:33 PM on February 5 [2 favorites]
I think the people at Google didn't actually consciously set out to make the internet worse.
Perhaps that was true before they tossed the company into the rapacious maw of the advertising industry, but given that they absolutely knew what that would do to it and then did it anyway, the plausible on that particular deniability is pretty thin.
Evil: stand back and stand by.
posted by flabdablet at 8:34 PM on February 5 [5 favorites]
Perhaps that was true before they tossed the company into the rapacious maw of the advertising industry, but given that they absolutely knew what that would do to it and then did it anyway, the plausible on that particular deniability is pretty thin.
Evil: stand back and stand by.
posted by flabdablet at 8:34 PM on February 5 [5 favorites]
And speaking of websites, perhaps a special Mefi area listing the websites created by members would be a nice addition?
I second this! I was just about to private-message everyone on this thread who mentioned their blog to ask for URLs to add to my RSS reader app.
(Every time I see someone lament the death of Google Reader, I think “You do know that there are existing replacements for that, right?”)
posted by ejs at 9:38 PM on February 5 [4 favorites]
I second this! I was just about to private-message everyone on this thread who mentioned their blog to ask for URLs to add to my RSS reader app.
(Every time I see someone lament the death of Google Reader, I think “You do know that there are existing replacements for that, right?”)
posted by ejs at 9:38 PM on February 5 [4 favorites]
I am a reasonably technically capable person. No coding genius or anything, but I have some training in the area, and jesus wept, I have been trying to get a working WordPress install on my personal website for a couple of months now and it is a nightmare of 'install this badly documented plug-in so that you can enable that badly documented plug-in and then try to guess how they work together'. Also, you get to pay for all these plug-ins separately. I can sure as hell see why you might consider an Instagram account more than enough for your business under these circumstances.
THIS. This sort of thing is what comes to mind when people talk about "but why aren't there websites anymore?????" Because right now every damn CMS assumes you are a Developer TM with Server Access (god forbid you want any sort of theming and IMAGES on your layouts) and then when you look up server hosting options they talk about how their packages allow "5 apps per account" and you don't know if "a subsite of my main website" counts as an app and aarrrggghhhhhhhh
Or you spend hundreds on SquareSpace et al subscriptions even though it's not as custom as you'd like but it's better then nothing I suppose
The Matt in Automattic was super rude to people asking for basic functionality in WordPress.com and I've never really forgiven him for it. If anyone knows how to have the front page of your Tumblr not show all your posts but rather be some sort of a splash entry page, that'd be ace
posted by creatrixtiara at 10:14 PM on February 5 [5 favorites]
THIS. This sort of thing is what comes to mind when people talk about "but why aren't there websites anymore?????" Because right now every damn CMS assumes you are a Developer TM with Server Access (god forbid you want any sort of theming and IMAGES on your layouts) and then when you look up server hosting options they talk about how their packages allow "5 apps per account" and you don't know if "a subsite of my main website" counts as an app and aarrrggghhhhhhhh
Or you spend hundreds on SquareSpace et al subscriptions even though it's not as custom as you'd like but it's better then nothing I suppose
The Matt in Automattic was super rude to people asking for basic functionality in WordPress.com and I've never really forgiven him for it. If anyone knows how to have the front page of your Tumblr not show all your posts but rather be some sort of a splash entry page, that'd be ace
posted by creatrixtiara at 10:14 PM on February 5 [5 favorites]
I don't really understand why the default style sheet for browsers is so bad.
In principle it's a good way to go but there are problems. For example, if you post images to your photography blog, you may want them to be nice and big for desktop visitors... But if you also have paragraphs of text that go with them, you don't want those paragraphs to turn into a single line of text that people need to scroll endlessly to read if someone is visiting from their mobile device.
Like someone already mentioned, a couple of lines of CSS go a long way.
Still, I run an e-commerce business and even that wouldn't work for me, although I do try to keep my site as accessable as I can.
I'm already grateful that people go out of their to skip Amazon and make an effort to browse my site, put in their payment info, and so on. That's a lot of work! +1 for the independent world wide web.
But the fact is that if I want to accept payments, I need to ensure my customers' security and privacy is taken care of — so I use a modern payment system and not something I'll make from scratch. I don't even know it it's possible within reason to do without CSS/JS.
posted by romb at 10:26 PM on February 5 [1 favorite]
In principle it's a good way to go but there are problems. For example, if you post images to your photography blog, you may want them to be nice and big for desktop visitors... But if you also have paragraphs of text that go with them, you don't want those paragraphs to turn into a single line of text that people need to scroll endlessly to read if someone is visiting from their mobile device.
Like someone already mentioned, a couple of lines of CSS go a long way.
Still, I run an e-commerce business and even that wouldn't work for me, although I do try to keep my site as accessable as I can.
I'm already grateful that people go out of their to skip Amazon and make an effort to browse my site, put in their payment info, and so on. That's a lot of work! +1 for the independent world wide web.
But the fact is that if I want to accept payments, I need to ensure my customers' security and privacy is taken care of — so I use a modern payment system and not something I'll make from scratch. I don't even know it it's possible within reason to do without CSS/JS.
posted by romb at 10:26 PM on February 5 [1 favorite]
I'm scratching my head at the complaints here that Wordpress is complicated. I've been using it for nearly twenty years now. It installs exactly the same as it did back then and is used in exactly the same way. It hasn't somehow become more complicated during those twenty years. It's really a very simple tool to use. You can use out-of-the box templates and plugins to achieve almost anything you want with ease and for free.
I am confused.
posted by jdroth at 10:42 PM on February 5 [2 favorites]
I am confused.
posted by jdroth at 10:42 PM on February 5 [2 favorites]
the problem is search, y'all
I don’t agree, and I will try to tell you why.
Imagine what it would be like using the net without search (I guess some of you are old enough to remember it). You will be limited to what you can find yourself, which means that you will be limited to what the people you know or the sites you read are linking to. This means that you will be limited to what your social network is showing you – and social networks are not created alike. Some people have huge and expanding social networks, and some have not. If your personal network is too small, nothing will lead you to all the interesting things you are missing. You might feel that there's an interesting world out there, but you don't know how to access it.
A web without search would look like this: some people will be living in New York City, with an enormous and constantly developing abundance of things to see and people to talk to, while others will be forever trapped inside Sucksville, with no outgoing links. Search increases the possibility that anyone – not just the well-connected – will find interesting content online.
I think what you are dissatisfied with isn’t search – it’s commercialized search. It is absurd that it is impossible to use the internet without a global monopoly spying on you in order to sell ads (see Shoshana Zuboff's book Surveillance capitalism), but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Search engines could be run by universities, or why not by national libraries, and then search would be different (although not without its inherent problems).
posted by Termite at 11:21 PM on February 5 [10 favorites]
I don’t agree, and I will try to tell you why.
Imagine what it would be like using the net without search (I guess some of you are old enough to remember it). You will be limited to what you can find yourself, which means that you will be limited to what the people you know or the sites you read are linking to. This means that you will be limited to what your social network is showing you – and social networks are not created alike. Some people have huge and expanding social networks, and some have not. If your personal network is too small, nothing will lead you to all the interesting things you are missing. You might feel that there's an interesting world out there, but you don't know how to access it.
A web without search would look like this: some people will be living in New York City, with an enormous and constantly developing abundance of things to see and people to talk to, while others will be forever trapped inside Sucksville, with no outgoing links. Search increases the possibility that anyone – not just the well-connected – will find interesting content online.
I think what you are dissatisfied with isn’t search – it’s commercialized search. It is absurd that it is impossible to use the internet without a global monopoly spying on you in order to sell ads (see Shoshana Zuboff's book Surveillance capitalism), but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Search engines could be run by universities, or why not by national libraries, and then search would be different (although not without its inherent problems).
posted by Termite at 11:21 PM on February 5 [10 favorites]
It will be interesting to see whether Kagi's business model proves sustainable. That it's got as far as it already has with no VC involvement and fuck-all spent on marketing is certainly reinforcing my own prejudices about the essentially parasitic nature of both of those things.
posted by flabdablet at 11:57 PM on February 5 [2 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 11:57 PM on February 5 [2 favorites]
A web without search would look like this: some people will be living in New York City, with an enormous and constantly developing abundance of things to see and people to talk to, while others will be forever trapped inside Sucksville, with no outgoing links.
Of course, the way Google is now, most sites are already trapped in Sucksville. There are so many things that affect whether you get ranked highly in search that prioritize big players who can afford SEO, not to mention they purposely punish sites that don't aim at mobile. Also, it feels like Google is prioritizing its own services? Do a video search these days and you'll often get a page entirely of Youtube videos.
I'm not nearly as against search as bombastic lowercase pronouncements is, although I'm also not sure Kagi is the answer, most paid services ultimately increase the digital divide, that between the savvy and the clueless, a line that often comes down to wealth. Also, it's not really true that if you're not paying for it then you're the product: lots of services that charge users also sell them out. I think ultimately a non-profit search engine might work, although of course funding it would be challenging. Also, I think the era of web directories might be coming back, although maybe not in the form of the Yahoo Directory of old.
posted by JHarris at 12:14 AM on February 6 [4 favorites]
Of course, the way Google is now, most sites are already trapped in Sucksville. There are so many things that affect whether you get ranked highly in search that prioritize big players who can afford SEO, not to mention they purposely punish sites that don't aim at mobile. Also, it feels like Google is prioritizing its own services? Do a video search these days and you'll often get a page entirely of Youtube videos.
I'm not nearly as against search as bombastic lowercase pronouncements is, although I'm also not sure Kagi is the answer, most paid services ultimately increase the digital divide, that between the savvy and the clueless, a line that often comes down to wealth. Also, it's not really true that if you're not paying for it then you're the product: lots of services that charge users also sell them out. I think ultimately a non-profit search engine might work, although of course funding it would be challenging. Also, I think the era of web directories might be coming back, although maybe not in the form of the Yahoo Directory of old.
posted by JHarris at 12:14 AM on February 6 [4 favorites]
For search to be the problem, we would have to actually still have search. Instead of a directory that autocorrects to the (Levenshtein- or word2vec-) nearest profitable entry.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 2:20 AM on February 6 [8 favorites]
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 2:20 AM on February 6 [8 favorites]
I am confused.
You're assuming that people have the skill base that two decades of use and exposure to the platform have given you. But they don't, which is why WordPress is such a massive headache for newcomers to the platform, especially when screwing up can have dire consequences with having your site hacked. It's not surprising that people would decide that it's easier to let someone else deal with that headache.
The old school "DIY" ethos of the early web had a major assumption that users would be expected to learn a bunch of skills that might be completely orthogonal to the user's own interests and strengths that unsurprisingly didn't hold up. It also didn't help that there was a lot of victim blaming of people who were hacked as well, thanks to the Californian Ideology's views on the matter.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:47 AM on February 6 [7 favorites]
You're assuming that people have the skill base that two decades of use and exposure to the platform have given you. But they don't, which is why WordPress is such a massive headache for newcomers to the platform, especially when screwing up can have dire consequences with having your site hacked. It's not surprising that people would decide that it's easier to let someone else deal with that headache.
The old school "DIY" ethos of the early web had a major assumption that users would be expected to learn a bunch of skills that might be completely orthogonal to the user's own interests and strengths that unsurprisingly didn't hold up. It also didn't help that there was a lot of victim blaming of people who were hacked as well, thanks to the Californian Ideology's views on the matter.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:47 AM on February 6 [7 favorites]
WordPress is a blog platform though, right? Do people make business web sites with it?
I know a few places local to me that have basically Web 1.0 pages, like literally a single page with contact info and some menu blurb. It's better than nothing, or nothing + Instagram.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:56 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]
I know a few places local to me that have basically Web 1.0 pages, like literally a single page with contact info and some menu blurb. It's better than nothing, or nothing + Instagram.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:56 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]
You can use out-of-the box templates and plugins to achieve almost anything you want with ease and for free.
SOME of those templates and plugins achieve ALMOST anything.
For me, those templates and plugins work because all I'm doing is a cheeseball blog of writing with occasional images I've copied-and-pasted. Also, I happened to choose a template that would self-adjust depending on whether a person was viewing it on their phone, a tablet, or a desktop. I also went minimal on the plugins because I just plain don't need a shit of a lot.
If I were trying to set up something that involved some kind of internal search or some kind of pay functionality, and it was something that I'd need to show off images or video, or I wanted to update the background....that may be a lot harder.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:56 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]
SOME of those templates and plugins achieve ALMOST anything.
For me, those templates and plugins work because all I'm doing is a cheeseball blog of writing with occasional images I've copied-and-pasted. Also, I happened to choose a template that would self-adjust depending on whether a person was viewing it on their phone, a tablet, or a desktop. I also went minimal on the plugins because I just plain don't need a shit of a lot.
If I were trying to set up something that involved some kind of internal search or some kind of pay functionality, and it was something that I'd need to show off images or video, or I wanted to update the background....that may be a lot harder.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:56 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]
WordPress is a blog platform though, right? Do people make business web sites with it?
Yes, it's one of the most popular CMS for business websites, large corporations and government organizations. It's not the latest hyped tech but it's open source and, for experienced developers who know which plugins to choose, can be extended to make pretty much anything that you'd want from a CMS. There are beautiful world-class sites running on WordPress.
But, like EmpressCallipygos mentioned above, pretty much any customization is not easy. WordPress is easy for a beginner to catastrophically mess up. The plethora of plugins is a curse as much as it is a blessing. Backing up a version of a website is not easy; doing something as simple as switching or updating a theme or installing a plugin can mess up the entire site in a way you'd need an expert to clean up. Non-expert users hit brick walls quickly.
I've used dozens of CMSs and, while there are many interesting ones (mostly from a developer's perspective), there aren't many that I'd consider 'easy' for a true beginner — at least not any that are self-hosted.
posted by romb at 8:53 AM on February 6 [5 favorites]
Yes, it's one of the most popular CMS for business websites, large corporations and government organizations. It's not the latest hyped tech but it's open source and, for experienced developers who know which plugins to choose, can be extended to make pretty much anything that you'd want from a CMS. There are beautiful world-class sites running on WordPress.
But, like EmpressCallipygos mentioned above, pretty much any customization is not easy. WordPress is easy for a beginner to catastrophically mess up. The plethora of plugins is a curse as much as it is a blessing. Backing up a version of a website is not easy; doing something as simple as switching or updating a theme or installing a plugin can mess up the entire site in a way you'd need an expert to clean up. Non-expert users hit brick walls quickly.
I've used dozens of CMSs and, while there are many interesting ones (mostly from a developer's perspective), there aren't many that I'd consider 'easy' for a true beginner — at least not any that are self-hosted.
posted by romb at 8:53 AM on February 6 [5 favorites]
If you find the technical hurdles of Wordpress too great or annoying, there's been a boom in static site generation tools in recent years. They do add an extra step: instead of running the software on the server, where it could get hacked, where backups are done server-side, and where things can happen that are more out of your reach, you instead generate side pages locally and upload them yourself. It does mean you don't get community tools like comments, but most sites don't need them. It also means you'll probably have to install a scripting language. For Ruby there's Jekyll; for Python there's a number of options.
Our blog uses Wordpress because our tech person/site owner set it up for us, but if I were going it alone I'd definitely look into static site generation.
posted by JHarris at 12:41 PM on February 6 [2 favorites]
Our blog uses Wordpress because our tech person/site owner set it up for us, but if I were going it alone I'd definitely look into static site generation.
posted by JHarris at 12:41 PM on February 6 [2 favorites]
I transitioned from Google Reader to Feedly, and still bang the RSS drum. Curate your own web!
posted by PennD at 3:49 PM on February 6 [8 favorites]
posted by PennD at 3:49 PM on February 6 [8 favorites]
Blogger is still alive and kicking, but don't alert Google or they will kill it. Easiest blogging platform to use, and you don't have to self-host. Does rss naturally, ezpz.
I still hand-code my html and css like a caveman, but I like it that way.
Protip for others like me who like to Keep It Simple, Smartie: tables still work fine for layout, in all the desktop and mobile browsers I have tested on windows and ios.
Also, your text editor might angrily highlight center tags in red, but they still work too. The Deprecated HTML Police haven't gotten me yet.
posted by cats are weird at 10:07 PM on February 6 [5 favorites]
I still hand-code my html and css like a caveman, but I like it that way.
Protip for others like me who like to Keep It Simple, Smartie: tables still work fine for layout, in all the desktop and mobile browsers I have tested on windows and ios.
Also, your text editor might angrily highlight center tags in red, but they still work too. The Deprecated HTML Police haven't gotten me yet.
posted by cats are weird at 10:07 PM on February 6 [5 favorites]
Making a 90s style homepage is still fairly easy. In fact it’s probably easier than it was in the actual 90s. Browsers these days are reasonably standard compliant for the simple stuff, web space is dirt cheap and resources like https://www.w3schools.com/ were a big help when I revived my page a couple years ago.
I also generate my html, css and RSS locally and upload via FTP, no scripting, no server side code, no CMS required.
I think it’s more a question if you are okay with your homepage looking and feeling like a 90s page. Just as you have to decide if you are okay with doing the work for a dozen visitors a week and zero income.
posted by the_dreamwriter at 11:17 AM on February 7 [4 favorites]
I also generate my html, css and RSS locally and upload via FTP, no scripting, no server side code, no CMS required.
I think it’s more a question if you are okay with your homepage looking and feeling like a 90s page. Just as you have to decide if you are okay with doing the work for a dozen visitors a week and zero income.
posted by the_dreamwriter at 11:17 AM on February 7 [4 favorites]
If you find the technical hurdles of Wordpress too great or annoying, there's been a boom in static site generation tools in recent years. They do add an extra step: instead of running the software on the server, where it could get hacked, where backups are done server-side, and where things can happen that are more out of your reach, you instead generate side pages locally and upload them yourself. It does mean you don't get community tools like comments, but most sites don't need them. It also means you'll probably have to install a scripting language. For Ruby there's Jekyll; for Python there's a number of options.
The need to install a scripting language makes these static site generators even more of a technical hurdle than WordPress.
posted by creatrixtiara at 6:13 PM on February 7 [3 favorites]
The need to install a scripting language makes these static site generators even more of a technical hurdle than WordPress.
posted by creatrixtiara at 6:13 PM on February 7 [3 favorites]
The need to install a scripting language makes these static site generators even more of a technical hurdle than WordPress.
Yes and no? WordPress doesn't run on nothing either, but requires PHP and MySQL--the advantage there is more that your hosting provider probably sets it up for you. What a static site generator get you, I think, is that your writing doesn't get entered into a web form and put into the tender care of a bunch of scripts and an ecosystem of sometimes expensive plugins, but text files on your own computer. You do your editing locally, and run a command to generate the site files.
When I want to make an archive of Set Side B posts for an ebook compilation, it's surprisingly difficult wresting my writing back from Wordpress' workings. If the site were built using static site generator, I'd have the text files right there on my local machine to do whatever I wanted with. There are other ways, too, that it's simpler in operation. It does have the overhead of having to run a local scripting language locally, but either way that's going to be a factor, it just changes where the scripts reside, unless I wanted to hand code all the HTML myself on every page, and even in that case I'd still have to upload them. Static Site Generators are a way to get more modern site features, like a consistent look across the whole site, while not having to run your own blogging software on the server.
posted by JHarris at 4:30 PM on February 8 [2 favorites]
Yes and no? WordPress doesn't run on nothing either, but requires PHP and MySQL--the advantage there is more that your hosting provider probably sets it up for you. What a static site generator get you, I think, is that your writing doesn't get entered into a web form and put into the tender care of a bunch of scripts and an ecosystem of sometimes expensive plugins, but text files on your own computer. You do your editing locally, and run a command to generate the site files.
When I want to make an archive of Set Side B posts for an ebook compilation, it's surprisingly difficult wresting my writing back from Wordpress' workings. If the site were built using static site generator, I'd have the text files right there on my local machine to do whatever I wanted with. There are other ways, too, that it's simpler in operation. It does have the overhead of having to run a local scripting language locally, but either way that's going to be a factor, it just changes where the scripts reside, unless I wanted to hand code all the HTML myself on every page, and even in that case I'd still have to upload them. Static Site Generators are a way to get more modern site features, like a consistent look across the whole site, while not having to run your own blogging software on the server.
posted by JHarris at 4:30 PM on February 8 [2 favorites]
It's still a barrier to entry, and a significant one for people who learning a scripting language is orthogonal to their interests and skillset - which is why social media was so successful. And it still amazes me that the eldritch horror that is WordPress is still the industry standard, but at the same time I'm not, because there is little consideration for ease of use in the tech industry for a number of regions.
Also, part of my day job is managing a static site generator for my employer internally, and I can tell you that dealing with less technically adept users can be... a lot. (At least we have publication set up as a cron job pulling the latest version of the master branch of the GitHub repo, which makes that relatively easy and manageable.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:41 PM on February 8 [4 favorites]
Also, part of my day job is managing a static site generator for my employer internally, and I can tell you that dealing with less technically adept users can be... a lot. (At least we have publication set up as a cron job pulling the latest version of the master branch of the GitHub repo, which makes that relatively easy and manageable.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:41 PM on February 8 [4 favorites]
For people who already have experience hand-coding websites in HTML, and are looking to make that process a bit more manageable, static site generators could be a nice next step. Once you get past a tutorial or two for the initial setup, it's not much different than just writing HTML/CSS, basically. I agree with JHarris, being able to mess around with with a website that lives entirely in a folder on your desktop makes a lot of things much easier.
I enjoy working with HUGO.
posted by romb at 11:36 PM on February 9 [1 favorite]
I enjoy working with HUGO.
posted by romb at 11:36 PM on February 9 [1 favorite]
We use MkDocs ourselves, as the static site is used for documentation, and we already use other Markdown enabled tools like GitHub Enterprise and Visual Studio Code. And we're already seeing some friction, as DevOps is also using Confluence (a wiki platform that's starting to become an industry standard), which annoys me as we now have two "sources of truth", which is not how this works, and argh!
Like I said - a lot.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:49 AM on February 10 [1 favorite]
Like I said - a lot.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:49 AM on February 10 [1 favorite]
How do you install Hugo if you're just renting out server space, like what was common in Early 2000s (Teen Girl Internet)? The install info assumes direct server access - my main barrier to static site generators, where I can't just Command Line my way through things.
Also SSGs aren't so great if you want something like events or some other dynamic-ish thing. I've also found the theming code rather inscrutable.
posted by creatrixtiara at 7:09 PM on February 12 [3 favorites]
Also SSGs aren't so great if you want something like events or some other dynamic-ish thing. I've also found the theming code rather inscrutable.
posted by creatrixtiara at 7:09 PM on February 12 [3 favorites]
There's no need to install Hugo or another SSG on your server — you only upload the generated website. You can do that manually using an FTP program. So for those who are hand-coding HTML, that part should be familiar, late 1990s or early 2000s style. Some of the more automated methods are trickier of course.
Hugo has a pretty nice way to include JavaScript so your site doesn't need to be 'static' by any means. For my hobby projects it works well, just add JS where I need it.
posted by romb at 7:39 PM on February 13 [1 favorite]
Hugo has a pretty nice way to include JavaScript so your site doesn't need to be 'static' by any means. For my hobby projects it works well, just add JS where I need it.
posted by romb at 7:39 PM on February 13 [1 favorite]
The install info assumes direct server access - my main barrier to static site generators, where I can't just Command Line my way through things.
The command line instructions from that introductory HUGO tutorial you'd run on your computer. It's definitely a barrier if you haven't used that before.
posted by romb at 8:14 PM on February 13 [1 favorite]
The command line instructions from that introductory HUGO tutorial you'd run on your computer. It's definitely a barrier if you haven't used that before.
posted by romb at 8:14 PM on February 13 [1 favorite]
There's no need to install Hugo or another SSG on your server — you only upload the generated website. You can do that manually using an FTP program. So for those who are hand-coding HTML, that part should be familiar, late 1990s or early 2000s style.
Ooooooooohhhhhhhhhhh
See now that would have been useful to state upfront. All this while I was imagining it like WordPress or Movable Type or GreyMatter where you installed the CMS on your host server and then worked online!
Although would this allow you to post from any device, or would it always need to be the same device you installed Hugo on?
posted by creatrixtiara at 5:10 PM on February 14 [1 favorite]
Ooooooooohhhhhhhhhhh
See now that would have been useful to state upfront. All this while I was imagining it like WordPress or Movable Type or GreyMatter where you installed the CMS on your host server and then worked online!
Although would this allow you to post from any device, or would it always need to be the same device you installed Hugo on?
posted by creatrixtiara at 5:10 PM on February 14 [1 favorite]
I'd imagine that any device from which you wanted to update your static site would need not only Hugo and its prerequisites installed, but also a complete copy of the Markdown source files that you'd run Hugo against to define the site's contents, and also some tool for uploading the Hugo-generated device-local HTML/CSS/etc files to the site's web host.
It's not quite as hideous a prospect as it sounds, because Hugo uses git to organize its site source code, and the entire point and purpose of git is to provide a way for multiple users (or devices) to make changes to a single project's source code in a somewhat manageable and consistent fashion. The devices you're using would need either direct access to each other to keep their local git repositories up to date, or common access to an intermediary git repository hosted online, possibly somewhere like GitHub.
posted by flabdablet at 7:42 AM on February 15
It's not quite as hideous a prospect as it sounds, because Hugo uses git to organize its site source code, and the entire point and purpose of git is to provide a way for multiple users (or devices) to make changes to a single project's source code in a somewhat manageable and consistent fashion. The devices you're using would need either direct access to each other to keep their local git repositories up to date, or common access to an intermediary git repository hosted online, possibly somewhere like GitHub.
posted by flabdablet at 7:42 AM on February 15
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Proud weird sicko here since well before I started being able to thank you lot for finding me good stuff to look at in holy shit, has it really been almost twenty years same as in town?
And I got here via Everlasting Blort, which if that isn't a site living up to its name I don't know what is, which I found after inventing the word "blort" to use in a try for a Googlewhack that I'm really glad didn't work.
Algorithmic content curation can fuck right off out of my life. Do Not Want.
posted by flabdablet at 4:38 AM on February 5 [34 favorites]