4 ms·

I recently stumbled across a neocities site where the author specifically called this factor out as a reason why she uses a 90s-style personal site instead of p

I recently stumbled across a neocities site where the author specifically called this factor out as a reason why she uses a 90s-style personal site instead of posting things to social media or Medium or whatever. She observed that she's grown tired of the modern Web's obsession with accumulating Whuffie (my choice of words, not hers), and thinks it's probably an emotional net negative. With a personal site, she feels freer to treat her Web presence as a personal project that she does purely for her own personal satisfaction. And, because of that, she gets more joy out of it. She specifically called out that she doesn't have any traffic counters because she feels she's better off not worrying about that. For my part, I also enjoyed browsing her site more than I do modern blogs. It was a refreshing reminder of what the Internet was like back when spending hours browsing it was called "surfing", and the term "doomscrolling" hadn't been invented yet. I'm seriously considering creating my own Neocities site (or similar). If I do, I won't be worrying about engagement metrics, either.

DHPersonal 2y ago
The 90s style is certainly a fun marvel to me, but I think Neocities is an easy place to set up a modern site built with static site generators. I built my own non-90s blog with Jekyll and use the Neocities CLI to update the site.
- Gormo 2y ago
  Cloudflare Pages is also a decent option. They offer completely free static site hosting.
debo_ 2y ago
I do this too. I have a Gemini gemlog with an http proxy in front, and I write up a little summary of my posts each quarter and email it to a group of ~30 people I like to keep in touch with. I do this in place of having social media.
urban_alien 2y ago
What's the link to her blog?
- bunderbunder 2y ago
  I think that sharing a link to her site on a high traffic venue like Hacker News might be contrary to the author's wishes.
giantrobot 2y ago
I much prefer the "homepage" model over the "blog" model. A blog and the ecosystem around blogs has an implicit need for constant content. Blogs are typically displayed by feed readers sorted by time. If you don't post for some period of time your content will fall out of view. If blogging isn't your main interest it's fucking tiring. A homepage can feel finished. You build some pages around your interests and can stop. You don't need to be a "blogger", you can just share your interests. A homepage doesn't even need tending. It can just be a self contained thing. You can constantly update it but you don't need to. Unfortunately Google punishes any content that wasn't published recently. In order to just be found by most people you have to jump on the content generation treadmill. It's commendable when services like NeoCities bubble up existing content to new viewers. Same with Marginalia which does a good job finding content based on your search terms and not the fact it carries their ad network and claims to have been updated in the last nanosecond.
- thejohnconway 2y ago
  Yeah, seriously, the nostalgia for blogs is understandable, but I remember feeling they were ruining the internet. People used to have site laid out with categorised pages that were linked together. A bit like a personal Wikipedia. They would occasionally edit pages and keep up to date. Blogs replaced that with a chronological layering short posts. Bloggers feel pressure for little and often. They are not a good way to read about a subject (Wikipedia isn’t a blog!).
- derefr 2y ago
  > Blogs are typically displayed by feed readers sorted by time. If you don't post for some period of time your content will fall out of view. I've never used an (RSS/Atom) feed reader that would just barf every post of every blog into a single top-level feed. Feed readers, almost by definition of the genre, are programs that give you a sidebar with a hierarchy of subscribed feeds, grouped into categories (where a given feed can appear under multiple categories), and with unread counts beside each category and feed. You can then scroll through a category, or a specific blog. There usually isn't even an option to scroll through "everything" (though I guess you could do this by having every feed in the same category.) And personally, I don't think I've ever bothered scrolling through a category, either. I usually just decide what category I feel like looking at; notice a few blogs in it that are badged as unread, that I haven't looked at in a while; click into them; look at the few newest (or oldest) posts; and then maybe mark the rest as read if I feel like reading those few "caught me up." It's basically the same flow as if the feed posts were emails in an email client, sorted into individual per-blog folders. In short: what are you talking about? > You can constantly update it but you don't need to. The thing that confuses me about the "homepage" website style — and has since the 90s, when I was maintaining one of my own! — is: how do I present content that I am constantly adding bits and bobs to it, in such a way that people can discover that the content is evolving, and go look at it? Like, picture a "homepage"-style site, with one page showing off the author's rock collection, and another page with lines from famous rap battles. I can browse this at my leisure the first time I visit, and enjoy it, and that's great. But say I do that, and bookmark the site, and then I come back to it again a year later. Am I expected to just click through to each page again? Find the new rocks among the existing rocks, and the new quotes among the existing quotes? I don't think I'd bother. (Maybe I would if they were added chronologically to the bottom over time. The original "Evil Overlord list" was a site that grew like this. But most sites just slotted new stuff in alphabetiacally, or some other even-more-obscure way. The Jargon File always bothered me for this reason.) Presuming the author has added stuff since then, they likely did that because they want me (and their other "fans") to see it; but due to the lack of discoverability, I'm never going to. I feel like there's got to be some solution to this problem that doesn't involve just reinventing the modern web. Maybe a changelog, right there on the home page? I've seen "homepage"-style sites with these before. (Usually they use unstyled HTML4 tables.) But if I picture a "homepage" with a changelog... and I take that and automate the process of producing the changelog from the changes (as any programmer would feel the urge to do)... and I get annoyed at how mechanistic and opaque the changelog entries are, so I modify the workflow so that each change collects a plaintext "commit message" from me along with the change... then I feel like the results would just gradually converge into looking and acting like a blog. A blog that links to static "shrine" pages, sure! But still, the site's "spine" would be a blog. Disappointing. But maybe the "homepage"-idiomatic approach, would be to have a changelog per page, rather than one global one? It feels less blog-like, yes; and I've definitely seen 90s websites that do this as well, each page being its own standalone "document" including its own embedded revision history. (RFCs are such documents.) My issue with that, is that it'd kind of suck for being able to visit the site and find out whether there was anything changed since you last looked over everything. Feels like you'd need a separately-maintained email newsletter? Or perhaps some kind of indexer that regularly spiders these sites, scrapes the revision logs from each page (or just deltas them from previous versions), and then either spits out an RSS feed — or exposes a special kind of search engine that allows you to search any given website for its newest pages, taking a URL and outputting the site's pages ordered by last-modified date descending. Ideally with some heuristic that synthesizes some optimum between a summary of the page, and a highlight of its most recent change. ...but then, isn't that too a blog?
khrbrt 2y ago
"Whuffie" is a reference to the Cory Doctorow novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It's set a post-scarcity society, Whuffie acts as a sort of currency and is earned from clout and social status. The protagonist goes from being wealthy in Whuffie to destitute and needs to earn his way back up. I read it a long time ago as a weird story. Might be time for a reread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_King...

DHPersonal 2y ago

The 90s style is certainly a fun marvel to me, but I think Neocities is an easy place to set up a modern site built with static site generators. I built my own non-90s blog with Jekyll and use the Neocities CLI to update the site.

Gormo 2y ago
Cloudflare Pages is also a decent option. They offer completely free static site hosting.

debo_ 2y ago

I do this too. I have a Gemini gemlog with an http proxy in front, and I write up a little summary of my posts each quarter and email it to a group of ~30 people I like to keep in touch with. I do this in place of having social media.

urban_alien 2y ago

What's the link to her blog?

bunderbunder 2y ago
I think that sharing a link to her site on a high traffic venue like Hacker News might be contrary to the author's wishes.

giantrobot 2y ago

I much prefer the "homepage" model over the "blog" model. A blog and the ecosystem around blogs has an implicit need for constant content. Blogs are typically displayed by feed readers sorted by time. If you don't post for some period of time your content will fall out of view. If blogging isn't your main interest it's fucking tiring. A homepage can feel finished. You build some pages around your interests and can stop. You don't need to be a "blogger", you can just share your interests. A homepage doesn't even need tending. It can just be a self contained thing. You can constantly update it but you don't need to. Unfortunately Google punishes any content that wasn't published recently. In order to just be found by most people you have to jump on the content generation treadmill. It's commendable when services like NeoCities bubble up existing content to new viewers. Same with Marginalia which does a good job finding content based on your search terms and not the fact it carries their ad network and claims to have been updated in the last nanosecond.

thejohnconway 2y ago
Yeah, seriously, the nostalgia for blogs is understandable, but I remember feeling they were ruining the internet. People used to have site laid out with categorised pages that were linked together. A bit like a personal Wikipedia. They would occasionally edit pages and keep up to date. Blogs replaced that with a chronological layering short posts. Bloggers feel pressure for little and often. They are not a good way to read about a subject (Wikipedia isn’t a blog!).
derefr 2y ago
> Blogs are typically displayed by feed readers sorted by time. If you don't post for some period of time your content will fall out of view. I've never used an (RSS/Atom) feed reader that would just barf every post of every blog into a single top-level feed. Feed readers, almost by definition of the genre, are programs that give you a sidebar with a hierarchy of subscribed feeds, grouped into categories (where a given feed can appear under multiple categories), and with unread counts beside each category and feed. You can then scroll through a category, or a specific blog. There usually isn't even an option to scroll through "everything" (though I guess you could do this by having every feed in the same category.) And personally, I don't think I've ever bothered scrolling through a category, either. I usually just decide what category I feel like looking at; notice a few blogs in it that are badged as unread, that I haven't looked at in a while; click into them; look at the few newest (or oldest) posts; and then maybe mark the rest as read if I feel like reading those few "caught me up." It's basically the same flow as if the feed posts were emails in an email client, sorted into individual per-blog folders. In short: what are you talking about? > You can constantly update it but you don't need to. The thing that confuses me about the "homepage" website style — and has since the 90s, when I was maintaining one of my own! — is: how do I present content that I am constantly adding bits and bobs to it, in such a way that people can discover that the content is evolving, and go look at it? Like, picture a "homepage"-style site, with one page showing off the author's rock collection, and another page with lines from famous rap battles. I can browse this at my leisure the first time I visit, and enjoy it, and that's great. But say I do that, and bookmark the site, and then I come back to it again a year later. Am I expected to just click through to each page again? Find the new rocks among the existing rocks, and the new quotes among the existing quotes? I don't think I'd bother. (Maybe I would if they were added chronologically to the bottom over time. The original "Evil Overlord list" was a site that grew like this. But most sites just slotted new stuff in alphabetiacally, or some other even-more-obscure way. The Jargon File always bothered me for this reason.) Presuming the author has added stuff since then, they likely did that because they want me (and their other "fans") to see it; but due to the lack of discoverability, I'm never going to. I feel like there's got to be some solution to this problem that doesn't involve just reinventing the modern web. Maybe a changelog, right there on the home page? I've seen "homepage"-style sites with these before. (Usually they use unstyled HTML4 tables.) But if I picture a "homepage" with a changelog... and I take that and automate the process of producing the changelog from the changes (as any programmer would feel the urge to do)... and I get annoyed at how mechanistic and opaque the changelog entries are, so I modify the workflow so that each change collects a plaintext "commit message" from me along with the change... then I feel like the results would just gradually converge into looking and acting like a blog. A blog that links to static "shrine" pages, sure! But still, the site's "spine" would be a blog. Disappointing. But maybe the "homepage"-idiomatic approach, would be to have a changelog per page, rather than one global one? It feels less blog-like, yes; and I've definitely seen 90s websites that do this as well, each page being its own standalone "document" including its own embedded revision history. (RFCs are such documents.) My issue with that, is that it'd kind of suck for being able to visit the site and find out whether there was anything changed since you last looked over everything. Feels like you'd need a separately-maintained email newsletter? Or perhaps some kind of indexer that regularly spiders these sites, scrapes the revision logs from each page (or just deltas them from previous versions), and then either spits out an RSS feed — or exposes a special kind of search engine that allows you to search any given website for its newest pages, taking a URL and outputting the site's pages ordered by last-modified date descending. Ideally with some heuristic that synthesizes some optimum between a summary of the page, and a highlight of its most recent change. ...but then, isn't that too a blog?

khrbrt 2y ago

"Whuffie" is a reference to the Cory Doctorow novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It's set a post-scarcity society, Whuffie acts as a sort of currency and is earned from clout and social status. The protagonist goes from being wealthy in Whuffie to destitute and needs to earn his way back up. I read it a long time ago as a weird story. Might be time for a reread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_King...