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> Maintaining a personal website is about owning your digital presence, embracing creative freedom, and expressing your individuality! Hard disagree here. The
by cxr 2y ago
> Maintaining a personal website is about owning your digital presence, embracing creative freedom, and expressing your individuality!
Hard disagree here.
The value of this aspect of the IndieWeb movement is way too overstated. MySpace-like customization gets the entire obligation for empathy that's inherent in the user–creator relationship inverted. It should not matter whether you like blinking white stars on backgrounds that come straight from a Dan Flashes T-shirt and high-pitched chiptunes playing on a loop. If you really like those things so much, you should modify your user agent to show them to you when you're on the websites that other people have published instead of leaning on your control over the rules for what should show up in other people's browsers as your outlet for creative expression.
Look at books. Look at how little variation there is in presentation, despite the wide-ranging variation in content and themes. That's because, essentially, we figured out how to do books. We got them right. Tufte is good at deviating from the standard and taking care that the deviations contribute in a worthwhile way to the actual content. Most people are not. Look at the Reader Mode in various browsers. These things exist only because of the propensity for people—and not just amateurs; paid professionals, even—to utterly fail at providing what people really need and desire, which is a simple, unassuming and distraction-free substrate for the main message. (Much of the same is true of RSS readers that are exalted within the very same circles of "indie" consumers and creators.)
Look at those browsers' Reader Mode again. Try them all out, and find one whose defaults you find the most pleasing, and then go publish your indie site using that as a template. Forget about trying to wow people with CSS and animated confetti.
The real value of operating an indie site is that it gives you as the operator the latitude to say "no" to participating in the silos and walled gardens of contemporary social networks and instead contributing positively to the standards-based Web that interoperates best with the software (like RSS readers) that puts the user's best interest at the fore, which is all way, way more important (and totally opposite to) gimmicks and gewgaws like sparkles that follow your mouse cursor around.
- aboardRat4 2y agohttps://lockywolf.net/2023-12-05_how-to-make-a-good-feed-reader.d/index.html https://lockywolf.net/2023-12-05_how-to-make-a-good-feed-rea...
- miunau 2y agoI agree with the value of not wanting to participate. But your reasoning for denying individualism is myopic. Do you only count the ones that have words printed in 16 point type using a standard layout as books? There are all kinds of layouts available in book form. There are graphic novels. There are photography books. There are pop-up books. Books with braille. Books that have augmented reality elements in them. There are poetry books where words are deconstructed on the page, maybe with pages cut up deliberately. There's notes and opinions scribbled on the pages. Or you might get lucky and find some old leaves pressed in between there. Every possible individualistic concoction you can do with a bunch of paper and some form of printing exists, and if it doesn't yet, it will eventually. There are plenty of people that like the Lisa Frank looking websites. You don't need to be one of them, but you don't need to be a boring person, either.
- cxr 2y agoI guess all the most widely read authors (and almost every other published writer) are just boring.
- swatcoder 2y ago> Look at books. Look at how little variation there is in presentation I look at a lot of books. I don't think you've summarized them well here. I suggest you look at more yourself. You're missing a lot of beautiful art. That said, you're right that minimizing decoration and distraction is itself a treasured kind of expression enabled by independent publishing, set against a world where some six Lead Designers get to say precisely how everybody must read and see things this year. So I very much agree with your sentiment, but you happen to be doing a great injustice to books on your way to saying it. :)
- cxr 2y ago> I look at a lot of books. I don't think you've summarized them well here. I suggest you look at more yourself. You're missing a lot of beautiful art. This comment is pretty obnoxious. (I've stepped into a library, thanks.) For all the books that you're thinking of that don't fit the mold, when you put that set up against the set of those that do, it's not even close. I'm not talking about hypotheticals (i.e. the potential for stuff that could be made that deviates from the norm) or creative works that really exist but only at the margins (i.e. in small numbers by comparison). I'm talking about what people actually produce and consume in large numbers and the average experience for each context/form. There is undeniably a lot more homogeneity in books than blogs to a large degree. It's something like over a hundred or a thousand to 1.