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> There aren't many personal like websites I remember that have stayed personal sites for over 10 years. But some have, kind of. Take gwern.net or stevepavlina

by gwern 2y ago

> There aren't many personal like websites I remember that have stayed personal sites for over 10 years. But some have, kind of. Take gwern.net or stevepavlina (not a regular reader anymore): both of them - if you squint - look pretty similar minimal 2000 - 2010 style as when they first started, but the implementation has had to evolve as even things like CSS have had a bunch of breaking changes over the major versions. FWIW, I don't think CSS/JS have been much of a problem in terms of breaking. Before Said Achmiz got involved, while gwern.net was still a fairly simple static website, there were pretty much no serious instances of browsers breaking the CSS/JS. Everything ran fine. (Browsers are good at backwards compatibility, as long as you aren't pushing features too hard, as my site was not.) The big problem was changing expectations and demands. 2010-era Gwern.net would continue to look fine and render fine in a 2025 web browser... as long as you were on a desktop/laptop. If you were laying in bed at night on a smartphone or a tablet, it would be both blinding and unreadable. This wasn't a problem in 2010, when <5% of my traffic was 'mobile' and mobile was very hard to design for even if you wanted to bother, but it is a problem in 2025, when >50% of my traffic is mobile. You can't write off >50% of your traffic. People now assume that a website will render reasonably on a smartphone, and they increasingly assume there will be a dark-mode. But, even if you aren't using a legacy website based on Flash or tables, and are creating a clean greenfield HTML5 website, these are actually quite complex, demanding features! You can get 80% of the way with some relatively simple tweaks, but then the rest can be almost arbitrarily difficult. Note that aspects of dark-mode can be subtle - while most websites have settled on the body class approach which avoids the 'blinding flash of white' problem, they continue to screw up dark-mode by treating it as a binary toggle between light vs dark, instead of a three-way toggle between auto vs light vs dark, and most dark-modes settle for fading out images instead of inverting vs fading them with a heuristic like https://invertornot.com/ https://invertornot.com/ . (We're still iterating on both features. Most recently, in November 2024: moving the scrollspy header to the bottom of mobile screens instead of top, and taking another dive into color theory in order to have colored link-icons which look good on mobile dark-mode.) Compared to the burden of features like a mobile mode which is actually good, the regular level of web browser JS/CSS breakage is scarcely noticeable. (It tends to look something like, 'oh no, now in Chrome 123, there's a 1px gap in the dropcaps and the spacing constants have to be adjusted, THANKS GOOGLE'. Annoying, but hardly a major burden.) Of course, you can quickly strangle yourself with your dependency stack, particularly if you get involved in NPM or you listen to the wrong web gurus, and your website will break overnight, and JS is definitely very fragile and rapidly bitrotting if you define 'JS' as node et al. But if you are being sensible about it and using plain JS (as we do) or well-chosen stable frameworks, of web dev's woes, 'web browsers keep breaking old working CSS/JS' is thankfully far down the list. The big problems are self-inflicted ecosystem problems like bitrot/bitcreep (https://gwern.net/holy-war#bitrot https://gwern.net/holy-war#bitrot), and the ever greater complexity expected of websites compared to the old 'preview in the only web browser anyone uses (ie. IE6), make sure it looks fine in the standard monitor dimension 800x600, export from MS Frontpage, ftp up to your shell account, done' days.

1dom 2y ago
You have no idea how much joy it brings me to have something written to me, from you :) Your site does such an amazing job of capturing a particular way of thinking and interacting with the world. I can't articulate what that way is exactly, but it's been an immense comfort and an inspiration to me personally in so many ways since around 2010. I identify as a bit of an overthinker, and I see your site as a testament to what an overthinker can produce if they can wrangle their thoughts into a coherent personal website structure. I'll try not gush too much, but you are someone I have respected and followed on and off for most of my adult life, thank you, please have some warm fuzzy feelings of being appreciated by a random internet stranger. Anyway, back on topic... I think it depends what you define as breaking. I'm a simple, nerdy, backend/infra kinda person, so CSS issues don't really bother me too much - I like your "what gets used, works" thought, if I can read the text, I'll live with it. But I've met stereotypical designer-type web devs who make the 1px gap in Chrome 123 at least sound like a major burden. I don't know Said, but I assume they sit slightly closer towards the "1px gap _is_ broken" side than you or me, even if they're not a full blown designer-type. Regarding changing expectations, and the mobile example, I find it really interesting to read your thoughts on that. I feel like your website is an exception to normal expectations, at least for me. If I find myself on your site on mobile, I just e-mail the link to myself and pick it up on desktop. The information is so dense, stimulating and interlinked that consuming it on a tiny mobile feels like listening to Mozart over a tin can and some string. I think the physical mobile form factor is not good for long form or cerebral content, but maybe that's my own DeSkToP iS BeStToP bias. Have you done any analysis on bounce rates based on first visit device? I would guess a slightly higher return rate for people who visit on desktop first, as - to me at least - the archetypal gwern.net desktop website experience is a big part of the charm. > But if you are being sensible about it and using plain JS (as we do) or well-chosen stable frameworks, of web dev's woes, 'web browsers keep breaking old working CSS/JS' is thankfully far down the list. I think some of this also depends on motivations for having a website too. If it's to get notes out there, then as long as it can be read it's fine. But if it's to stay up to date and be associated with the latest and greatest web experiences and technologies (or at least be perceived to) you're destined to a life of new-shiny chasing and tech churn. I do wonder how much of that ability to identify "sensible and plain JS" comes from shiny-chasing 10 - 20 years ago and just using the bits that still work from then. What will be the "sensible and plain JS" in 20 years time? A lot of this I guess is also specific to being a dev for a personal site, rather than pro web designer: part of being a modern business is keeping a modern front, so whilst "browsers breaking because of old stuff" is far down the list "having to switch to new shiny framework because of business decision to 'refresh' things" is a lot higher. But to try bring to some sort of conclusion, on a technical/presentation level, HTML/CSS/browser breaking stuff are - or will be - problem for a lot of people getting started with personal websites, because even experienced nerds can struggle to identify which tech will be around in 5 years time. You probably don't see it as that much of a problem, because you've solved it with a combination of the 2 options I gave: your site feels like a stylistic ally to motherfuckingwebsite.com (minimalism), and effort has been put in to maintain it over the years (e.g. UI update efforts via Said). To tie this back to OP about blogs vs wikis, that's a slightly different problem the author faces IMO. Not quite bit rot, but something higher level, an anxiety around content structure matching the shape of thought of the individual author, and the perception of that (blog vs wiki vs garden vs pkm buzzword) rather than technical (React vs Angular vs js/css buzzword).

by gwern 2y ago

1dom 2y ago

You have no idea how much joy it brings me to have something written to me, from you :) Your site does such an amazing job of capturing a particular way of thinking and interacting with the world. I can't articulate what that way is exactly, but it's been an immense comfort and an inspiration to me personally in so many ways since around 2010. I identify as a bit of an overthinker, and I see your site as a testament to what an overthinker can produce if they can wrangle their thoughts into a coherent personal website structure. I'll try not gush too much, but you are someone I have respected and followed on and off for most of my adult life, thank you, please have some warm fuzzy feelings of being appreciated by a random internet stranger. Anyway, back on topic... I think it depends what you define as breaking. I'm a simple, nerdy, backend/infra kinda person, so CSS issues don't really bother me too much - I like your "what gets used, works" thought, if I can read the text, I'll live with it. But I've met stereotypical designer-type web devs who make the 1px gap in Chrome 123 at least sound like a major burden. I don't know Said, but I assume they sit slightly closer towards the "1px gap _is_ broken" side than you or me, even if they're not a full blown designer-type. Regarding changing expectations, and the mobile example, I find it really interesting to read your thoughts on that. I feel like your website is an exception to normal expectations, at least for me. If I find myself on your site on mobile, I just e-mail the link to myself and pick it up on desktop. The information is so dense, stimulating and interlinked that consuming it on a tiny mobile feels like listening to Mozart over a tin can and some string. I think the physical mobile form factor is not good for long form or cerebral content, but maybe that's my own DeSkToP iS BeStToP bias. Have you done any analysis on bounce rates based on first visit device? I would guess a slightly higher return rate for people who visit on desktop first, as - to me at least - the archetypal gwern.net desktop website experience is a big part of the charm. > But if you are being sensible about it and using plain JS (as we do) or well-chosen stable frameworks, of web dev's woes, 'web browsers keep breaking old working CSS/JS' is thankfully far down the list. I think some of this also depends on motivations for having a website too. If it's to get notes out there, then as long as it can be read it's fine. But if it's to stay up to date and be associated with the latest and greatest web experiences and technologies (or at least be perceived to) you're destined to a life of new-shiny chasing and tech churn. I do wonder how much of that ability to identify "sensible and plain JS" comes from shiny-chasing 10 - 20 years ago and just using the bits that still work from then. What will be the "sensible and plain JS" in 20 years time? A lot of this I guess is also specific to being a dev for a personal site, rather than pro web designer: part of being a modern business is keeping a modern front, so whilst "browsers breaking because of old stuff" is far down the list "having to switch to new shiny framework because of business decision to 'refresh' things" is a lot higher. But to try bring to some sort of conclusion, on a technical/presentation level, HTML/CSS/browser breaking stuff are - or will be - problem for a lot of people getting started with personal websites, because even experienced nerds can struggle to identify which tech will be around in 5 years time. You probably don't see it as that much of a problem, because you've solved it with a combination of the 2 options I gave: your site feels like a stylistic ally to motherfuckingwebsite.com (minimalism), and effort has been put in to maintain it over the years (e.g. UI update efforts via Said). To tie this back to OP about blogs vs wikis, that's a slightly different problem the author faces IMO. Not quite bit rot, but something higher level, an anxiety around content structure matching the shape of thought of the individual author, and the perception of that (blog vs wiki vs garden vs pkm buzzword) rather than technical (React vs Angular vs js/css buzzword).